


Pre-Wayward Sisters Rewatch Notes

by lizbobjones



Category: Supernatural, Wayward Sisters (TV)
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Meta Essay, Non Fiction, archived from elizabethrobertajones blog, watching notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 06:06:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 90,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16867537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones





	1. 1x09: HAVE SOME PATIENCE WHILE WE GO TO MISSOURI

I’ve been through here so recently but it still cracks me up in the intro when it recaps that Mary “is never coming back”, and then the ground it goes on to cover with her which is literally just her season 12 arc she returns to deal with properly. It’s pretty much neither here nor there, and while technically I’m rewatching this for Missouri, I have to admit I’m like 90% coming back here because of the phone call parallel to 13x01’s prayer because I like tormenting myself and that really sealed the deal on if I would come back to rewatch, since I covered seasons 1-4 in the hiatus.

It’s interesting to me that the recap covers so much of the already established Winchester Family History circa 1x09 because it’s going over the mythos of the family that led us to this point where we go to the home to explore all this and dig down into the emotional drama behind everything… To actually expose some of the things that we’ve been sitting on until this point. Our first sight of John since the Pilot, and Mary’s last moments in her chronological story until 11x23.  And beginning to get into the mystery of the evil that was done to Sam, and Mary’s part in it.

The reason I say all this is because obviously when we get to the season 13 episodes introducing us to our Wayward squad, the recaps of the episodes are going to have to cover this same ground - to tell us who everyone is, to bring them into the fold and to tie their stories together. Hopefully by the proper Wayward Sisters episode when we’ve had all the new girls’ stories, we’ll get a recap with a very similar feel: just a straightforward “this is the family, do you want to find out more about them?” sort of explanation.

I also remember from the rewatch I did in the summer that the Home one stood out to me for being so focused only on the Winchester mythos and the surrounding ones were more about the monsters and fighting and “saving people hunting things” that the family focus felt far more important here even before the episode started.

It’s weird, it makes me preemptively excited to see the family come together just because I know they’ll have to do the montage, and like this one was in a low key way, it will high key be a special event, because it will be ABOUT the new family we care about.

-

I am momentarily distracted by how this episode opens on Sam’s vision and then him obsessing over drawing the tree from outside the house over and over. I watched 1x17 last night with my mum and it reminds me of this season’s great subtle mirroring and repetition of moments and ideas and motifs, when Dean is obsessing over his mystery symbol. That was the silly example of this to break the tension but to keep consistency through the season, subtly repeating ideas in a way that just keeps it all kind of the same aesthetic, of Sam and Dean doodling on motel paper… Anyway, reminds me of Dabb era’s methods but they have 12 seasons of past canon to play with and in season 11 it was extremely blatant the way they revisited old ideas and told us they were shaking them up and doing them differently or just bringing them back for our consideration. I wonder if anyone ever collected up all the ways season 1 internally mirrors itself. It’s really just a spiral of mirrors that unlike the character development spiralling closer and closer to a desired end, this spirals out and out that the more canon there is the more there is to reference and repeat, and so it grows exponentially in mirrored subject matter…

At this point Wayward Sisters is going to have a bit of a job navigating the story to tell its own stuff in a fresh way without falling back on the repeated ideas - I don’t know if we should be looking for mirroring or if introducing the characters as part of Supernatural’s main canon means they can be used by the narrative in this way but only when they get to their own show will they then build their own language. The new show means they can play around with new ways of telling things and the tropes will probably be very different all over the place. Like, for once I’m not expecting a new psychic character to massively mirror Sam, even though Home and how Missouri and Sam bond over his powers is obviously like the main reason to come back here to rewatch before we get an episode where she does it with her own granddaughter. I don’t think there’s anything evil behind Patience’s powers especially if we’re assuming they’re inherited from Missouri and they’re not going to introduce some weird ideas about where those powers came from - it’s enough having them I think :P

On the other hand if Patience is being hunted by a hungry wraith that likes her powers then it IS a parallel to all the interest in Jack for HIS powers. We’ll see how it shakes out but once they’re in a show where they’re the main characters (and I really hope Patience is the POV character - I think actually not long after I was talking about that somewhere I saw an interview suggesting she WOULD be, which is AWESOME) then the fact that Patience is/was a Sam and Jack mirror will be utterly by the by. Really I just hope they don’t bend her to meet the perfect criteria for a mirror but develop her for herself and put Sam and Jack in her shadow.

-

Sam realises they need to go home and this is the motivation to reveal that he has been having psychic nightmares - the fact that someone is in trouble and needs saving and the only way to explain to Dean why he knows this is because he suspects he’s psychic. For narrative parallels to whatever might happen in 13x03 purposes, I’m interested in how Patience’s story compares to Sam’s, as she is reconnecting with Missouri by the sounds of things, and has her own issues with being disconnected from her family probably - this episode is still filled with massive disconnects and both of their parents withholding information or just outright avoiding them, seemingly for their own protection. (Mary being rather more direct about protecting them in a heroic way than John, hiding in the shadows refusing to confront them with the mytharc knowledge about Sam). Patience is prooobably going to be out of the loop on what’s happening to her, or out of the family loop, which means that this is going to be personal discovery for her too.

-

Oh hey and then Sam gets them through the door into the house by using a conditional amount of the truth (they’re sam and dean winchester and they used to live here) just like in 13x01 Dean just used the truth to the sheriff and got her on-board and them out of jail with that frankness… Sometimes it pays.

-

OH GOD Dean having to relive the fire by telling it to Sam… and 13x01 starting with Dean re-imagining/dreaming/having a vision about it again :<

-

I swear I started this trying to tell myself I would not make this about Man Pain because this is the Wayward Sisters watch but I am an addict

-

Dean goes to make the call and there’s a big blue shipping container thing beside him and it’s so claustrophobic, like he’s chosen the most confined secret space to make the call… It’s in total contrast to the vast open space he prayed in - but he STILL shuffled into the shadow of the (blue) building in order to make the prayer and get that illusion of privacy and confinement. The wide shot as he goes in here shows him behind the car and weaving between gas station junk and between these two buildings/large structures. In 13x02 just the random car parked at the back stops Dean from being entirely alone and exposed. I’ll take that as a commentary on his layers and how open he is being, although it’s sort of awkward when both times, of course, he’s going for a super private call that he’s going to open himself up for completely, revealing deep down things that have never been exposed before.

People literally started loving Dean about this exact second of the show because he broke so wonderfully to cry and reveal he’s not all his top layer stuff. I think someone on the superspecpod (2 of them?) said/agreed on this moment.

-

Of course we can assume Chuck is listening and not acting, not just because he’s omnipotent and abnormally attached to Dean of all humans, but also because John literally did hear this voicemail and either already was in or came straight to Lawrence.

-

God the fact he makes the call in front of the men’s room but then it’s the buccaneer’s room in 13x02… what a goofy episode… I hate it… Pfft

-

THIS IS SO HARD TO WATCH.

I rank Dean’s pain proportionate to his experience, and this is definitely the worst he’s ever been at this point, mostly because we never see him cry until then.

He certainly is dealing better than in 13x02 because he still has a job to do and it might be hard but at least he has some sort of focus and a reason for being there, and even if everything is all messed up (he has to be back here AND Sam has just revealed he’s psychic) that’s not completely and utterly unbearable in the same way losing Mary and Cas (and even Crowley) has made him shut down so hard in season 13. There’s no forward momentum for him. Jack is not enough of a motivation >.>

-

SAM: All right, so there are a few psychics and palm readers in town. There’s someone named El Divino. There’s, uh –-[He laughs.]—there’s the Mysterious Mister Fortinsky. Uh, Missouri Moseley—

Dear lord bring back these other guys just to kill them off for the epic 13 years of continuity you could get for free.

El Divino would be hilarious because I’m guessing the divine -> cas connection would be especially hilarious to play on

-

These lines are moments apart:

SAM: [reading] I went to Missouri and I learned the truth.  
[…]  
DEAN: Why didn’t you tell him?  
MISSOURI: People don’t come here for the truth. They come for good news.

Yeah, not that she gave John any………………………… or did she not tell him EVERYTHING she suspected/read about what had happened to Sam in that night? Exactly how far-ranging are her powers? Could she have seen what Azazel did by proximity to the attack around the time it happened and to John? She could see that dude’s wife was having an affair, which is out of his knowledge range, so does that mean she knew about Mary’s deal, which is loosely coded as infidelity to John with Azazel?

Gaaaah.

-

but oh NO - Missouri takes one look at Sam and Dean and specifically analyses Sam’s woes as missing his dead loved one and Dean’s as his missing parent…

*flippy flippy to season 13’s entire framing of their loss*

-

TBH Missouri getting annoyed at Dean asking where their father is is probably specifically because she knows exactly where he is, aka hiding in the spare room upstairs doing whatever angsty things John does, and she’s trying to shake Dean off of asking, and she is probably not that great at lying when she is in the middle of it all instead of just cheerfully telling people what they want to hear.

-

Maybe the whack you with a spoon thing was also to make Dean so uncomfortable with her he wouldn’t keep bugging her for info about things she did not want to admit right then.

Keep them on track

-

I do feel like she was here to challenge them, not to nurture them, and I think it’s weirdly the same issue people are having with Mary in season 12 and Dean “parenting” Jack in season 13, where she is not actually meant to be a motherly character, and I have historically had no issues with her in the past, before fandom and everything needing to be tuned to being good to your fave or otherwise the Worst. She’s interesting and introduced even just with that guy she lies to as being mercurial and emotionally untrustworthy. She lets them behind the veil as it were since they know she’s really psychic but clearly using that power carefully and not being too accurate all the time for people when the truth hurts and her powers can be better used for reading people and working out what would be best to tell them… But for hunters it’s a different story… but that doesn’t change her default personality… Especially as the end of the episode reveals she has been withholding literally the object of this season’s quest from them at this early stage. She literally plays them like her customers except with the personal plot info she can’t tell them.

So when she goes through the door saying Dean’s not the sharpest tool the shed, she is not a person in a position of emotional responsibility to them, we just see Sam and Dean as scared confused little ducklings (like Jack in season 13) and people being harsh with them, especially I think when we come back to them with years of seeing them grow up and grow harder, so they’re all soft and fluffy and mostly unharmed at this point, it’s so easy to be defensive of them… And I mean I AM because DEAN, but not so much I think this means Missouri is a horrible person or that she’s cruel or Dean shouldn’t give her the time of day in season 13 or whatever. I find her to be interesting and she’s an obstacle they DON’T overcome because she is twice as fast as them with her psychic advantage so she can help them for the GREATER GOOD, but conceal their much more personal issue from them, making her a minor (friendly and great good-motivated) antagonistic as far as the stuff that matters on the character side of things goes.

In season 13 she has nothing to lose in hiding things from them or lying to them, I bet, especially as she appears to be the one asking them for help rather than them coming to her, so I assume she will be more open, and I also assume that with 13 years space in between, Dean is not going to hold a serious grudge for the way she treated him - because those words are just a few from a one-off meeting with her rather than a childhood of negging or something. Like with Mary she doesn’t have responsibility over them as adults, or a moral obligation to them in the same way a recognised caregiver would.

If she can read inside their heads and treats Dean this way she is doing it for a reason and she’s running circles around them to not reveal that John has been in contact with her or that even at this point perhaps she knows he’s already in town.

-

OH NO the nursery scene… This is where it all happened. A dark energy in the room…

And now we know that Jack being born and sloping off to the nursery to hide in the corner was heralded by a wave of powerful GOOD energy, not the “toxic” energy of Lucifer and the same thing that Azazel corrupted this room with.

-

Also Missouri calling Dean an amateur for using an EMF meter might be more of the negging but this scene is Missouri being a serious professional at the ghost hunting thing just by  being herself… I think since she’s coming back and it will be a less personally charged episode - pretty much has to be - then her natural competence at hunting will be an asset. She might not be able to handle wraiths as easily as ghosts but she certainly has a whole load of real spell ingredients and knowledge about things that really work for actual hunting. She’s not a hapless bystander even if her day job is fortune telling…

-

Oh and then we have Sam out-psychic-ing Missouri. Probably because he’s got demon blood but it is interesting what might happen with Patience - if she’s more sensitive than Missouri as well, or if they have the same level of talent. It would change from being ominous about Sam - with Missouri as our default example of what the generic psychic of this world building can do as the season 1 intro of such a character, and how Sam is unnerving because he can do more - to a story about outgrowing the talent of your elders and forging your own way in the world with your own strength that only you can define since help can only go so far when you outshine them… In storytelling purposes I can’t really imagine they won’t make Patience as good as (but with a better innovative mindset) or better than Missouri (in raw power) just because “oh here’s a slightly less psychic character” just doesn’t really sparkle off the page as a hook. We’ll see, but I can imagine it being kinda like the stuff that happens with Sam here, but not in an ominous way, just in a way that Patience is going to move on and join the Wayward Sisters.

Of course Missouri could just die and motivate her even if she has average/normal powers, because she won’t be measuring herself against Missouri and it would be a motivation to be as good as she was from a start where her powers are a bit wonky.

(Although with Jack around I can see them being veeery tempted by her being super powerful but not knowing how to control it yet just for the sake of having a parallel.)

-

I am still not over Sam saying he can “see” Mary now before she appears to him, neatly book-ending this scene and 12x22 and Dean asking Mary to see HIM, and basically the fact they stole literally Mary’s entire arc in season 12 from the staging of this scene.

And if you want to keep recycling it in reverse, she burns up again in 13x01 in Dean’s dream, to cap that all off.

Wheee

-

It’s weird having Mary on screen in this over-dramatic OMG it’s MARY way where it’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened, and then we got a whole season of her where she was just kinda around :P

-

SAM: What’s happening to me?  
MISSOURI: I know I should have all the answers, but I don’t know.

And yep she’s still lying to them and hiding everything she knows, and as such even though she’s kinder to Sam since he’s probing her less and less snappy than Dean, she doesn’t give him the exact advice and information he needs even though apparently she and John knew a hell of a lot for ages…

You know what I would like? This is a total pipe dream, but for her to tell Dean what she actually knew when they met her, and maybe even apologise for withholding information because John said it was for the best and all. Because Sam was FUCKED UP by all this and honestly considering it’s all one emotional arc right through the show it makes you wonder what Sam being given actual information by someone other than Azazel when it amuses him to do so would have ever done to help him figure out who he was, what was happening to him, and how he should react to it.

He’s sitting on these steps feeling probably somewhat the same as Jack did in 13x02 where he was sitting on that crate in the alley, although from a less aggressive situation, just, kinda reflecting on everything that happened. He sees there’s a pattern in everything kicking off, and now Mary apologises to him… And he’s got these powers he’s only just daring to even voice exist and grappling with what will be his myth arc for basically ever… And Missouri lies to him and withholds information he needs. John knows stuff about Sam - he DIES knowing more about Sam than they ever did until waaay too late. He probably knew BY THEN that Sam had demon blood, which wasn’t revealed until the end of season 2, but logically follows from John’s last words to mean that whatever reveal about Sam came at the end of the season, this is what he was worried Dean had to save Sam from (or kill him) at the start of the season when he could last have any input on that. And he spent most of season 1 chasing Azazel or working out how to kill him rather than researching Sam so I go back to wondering if Missouri put most of it together herself.

I wonder how much she didn’t tell John.

I wonder what she DID tell John the moment the credits rolled on the episode and they were free to talk plot without spoiling anything for us. Did Missouri get him a cup of tea, sit down with him and tell him her full professional opinion of Sam which kicked off the entire everything else John did re: Sam? It’s only a couple of episodes before he’s on the other side of the country chasing leads on Azazel.

I wonder if she’d tell us any of this 13 years later…

…

I bet she says basically nothing, but these are my hanging questions about season 1 and 2 which ONLY she can enlighten us on.

-

“Don’t you boys be strangers!” “We won’t.” “See you around!”

welp, sorry Alpha Vampire and “see you next season” but this absolutely and emphatically takes the cake now she is actually returning at long last and it’s not just an amusing line about her never coming back - it’s an amusing line about her not coming back for thirteen freakin years.

-

Oh look it’s JDM

-

This rewatch is so weird and messed up about what characters and plot things we’re going to pass through. Sure the Wayward Sisters are utterly embedded in the show and even w/o the Patience thing go back more than half it’s run - ¾ of its run in fact - but they appear in such strange places tangential to massive happenings that following the characters around is going to be The Most Chaotic Rewatch Ever, for someone who likes meta-ing patterns.

I mean after this my next episode is to hop along to Claire’s intro.

-

Anyway, John resisting going to see them but “not until I know the truth” which I assume is not the reason Chuck is being hands off in season 13 but I assume he thinks he has his reasons not to intervene.

John learned the truth from Missouri about monsters and the like, but now he’s chasing the much bigger, plot important truths… It’s going to mean he basically never sees his sons again, except for the prolonged contact at the end of this season/start of the next where he’s sitting on whatever he knew about Sam which prompted his last words to Dean. I seriously, SERIOUSLY wonder if him saying he needs to know the truth ties back to “I went to Missouri and learned the truth” and that she DID tell John that Sam has demon blood and she put it all together between their initial contact and meeting Sam with his powers activated in their present day.

Oh gosh, I am sure someone has come up with that before, probably 13 years ago, but still. That’s a good conspiracy to end on…


	2. 4x20: IN WHICH THE SPN MAIN CHARACTERS ARE JUST TRAGIC BACKSTORY

Hi so which episode can I possibly watch right now 2 episodes into season 13 which will make me miss Cas the absolute most while still being all about Cas? :P

-

The funniest thing about just dropping in on Cas episodes in season 4 with no context is that the recap telling us everything about Cas makes me realise that in 4x01 Misha was barely trying with the Cas voice. I have to think that Jimmy’s vocal cords got slightly singed from having to translate from angel all the time or something.

For the absolute longest time I was convinced that the line about Jimmy in 4x01 was cut for time from the original episode and only in the recap for 4x20, but then at some point or another like one of those magic eye pictures I suddenly heard it again in 4x01. I have to assume I was just always overwhelmed and excited at Cas’s presence and missed it or something :P

-

Talking about the Cas/Dean Sam/Ruby parallels can I get a “what the fuck” for Dean saying “BFFs with a demon” overlaid on Sam and Ruby’s “our children must never watch this episode” moment. It’s the specific phrasing and the way that this story, now all the cards are on the table, is expressly being told as half Dean and Cas’s nonsense and half Sam and Ruby’s nonsense, and Dean is currently becoming BFFs with an angel and here we have the phrase being used to allude to what Sam and Ruby were getting up to. I’m just saying, the show is aaawfully flexible about what that phrase means. :P

-

Dean fishing will never not be awful.

-

Also the way the light disappears from the water when Cas disappears really does sound like a summary of Dean in season 7/13 :P

-

I miss Cas enormously. He has the worst bedside manner. It’s not safe here - we’re in my head - yeah bitch i can’t put warding up in here so wake the hell up and come to a safe place.

-

*Dean wakes up like what the fuck at least Sam gets to bang his supernatural guide for the season I’m just left hanging*

-

Also Cas is so fucking extra, Sam draws a palm-sized banishing in the middle of a fight… Cas draws one taller than he is

-

*high pitched whimpering from Jimmy*

*title card*

-

I love the emphasis that Jimmy is human by showing him eating so hungrily, in contrast to Cas who’s all stoic and mysterious and absolutely does not eat even from what we know in season 4 so far which is that he just seems like someone who does not have the time - which then in turn of course was why we had Cas eating burgers so much in 5x14 as a callback to this episode, to this time when we saw someone with Cas’s face devouring a burger basically for our benefit of knowing this was in no way Cas. Burgers of humanity - that good old longstanding symbolism and heeey who just devoured a burger for our benefit of knowing he was human in 13x02? :P

-

Dean is considerably less impressed because this is Not Cas. I think in contrast to 4x09 where we find out Ruby picked an empty vessel for Sam’s sake, this is just driving home to Dean how utterly unobtainable Cas is - almost reminding him to be guilty for ever thinking he was hot stuff - because the vessel problem applies to Cas as well, and now not only is there the abstract concept that Cas is “possessing some poor bastard” but now they have to actually talk to him and deal with him, when basically the only info they had going into this is he’s the sort of guy who is “devout” and decides to just let an angel possess him one day.

It’s interesting in a season 10 context just because they of course bring up Jimmy again and then flashback to his family - that’s how Jimmy defines himself - name, home town and “I have a family” - and so once we delve The Vessel Problem for Cas again, doing it because of Claire makes a world of sense than just finding some way to bring it up out of the blue (I say that - he was human the season before and no one was like… uh i hope jimmy isn’t in there with you…)

… Perhaps they just wanted people to stop worrying about Jimmy when he was only alive for another 2 episodes after this, but a major benefit is 100% ethical shipping >.> Anyway I think they wanted to bring Claire back to explore who she became because they were fishing around for storylines and she was a major loose end specifically when it comes to Cas’s impact on the world and promises he made etc, and it would give Cas something to do in the gaps in season 10 and it was about time in his personal arc of feeling connected to humanity and all.   
There’s just something about the way in season 4 The Vessel Problem was specifically for sexual stuff, and tbh Jimmy praying for Cas or his sacrifice would be enough that we can say Cas isn’t wildly unethical to use an occupied vessel, given the circumstances. But season 10 makes it extremely clear that Jimmy is dead and gone and Cas has that body all to himself to misuse however he likes. Which brings us back to why The Vessel Problem was ever something season 4 explored in the first place, and I will always come back to the parallel between Cas and Ruby to their respective Winchesters. It is essentially a question only begged for the sake of making sure Sam and Ruby weren’t getting involved in horrific dub con. And then for melodrama over here…

-

Anyway. I was mostly meaning to pause to write about Jimmy being a family man. And now Claire is on screen, getting around to turning this into the Wayward Sisters rewatch it was supposed to be :D As an unintentional origin story, it’s not really that bad at all. This episode was never written to SUPPORT Claire’s story starting but it’s full of fertile ground for a tragic backstory if we can just look at these flashbacks as for her instead.

Jimmy starts his flashback talking specifically to Claire - it’s her name he says first, not Amelia’s, and though his wife is obviously important to him, Claire is who he would die for in the specific circumstances the episode sets up, and Claire is in the firing line specifically for being a potential angelic vessel, of being Jimmy’s bloodline, and in the end for Cas actually possessing her. She’s made of the exact same stuff that Cas has been repeatedly creepily praised for when things have been interested in possessing him and fascinated at how strong his vessel is.

I would even wonder if that Jimmy sacrificed for love and family to protect Claire that it was even more unbreakable than just doing it for faith - that because he had a meaningful and life-defining reason to do it rather than the mild trickery Cas ran him through the first time - that it created a strength in Cas’s vessel that lasted beyond Jimmy, BECAUSE of the circumstances of gaining absolute informed consent from Jimmy from a place of pure love for Claire.

In season 13 fatherhood is the main theme of the season and Cas is one of those fathers, chosen by Jack. Waaay back in season 4 Cas started off as a John Winchester mirror before quickly becoming more of a friend and equal, and Jimmy is one of the show’s interesting examples of a father because he truly loved Claire and would die for her, but he made one hell of a bad decision for his family and that much was clear halfway through this episode, never mind his second decision to save Claire. It was very much John’s decision to die for Dean in 2x01 - to outright, immediately swap his life for that of a child. 10x09 and 10x20 actually explore the lasting consequences of that in recognition that Jimmy destroyed his family for Cas on the fateful night of saying Yes the first time, and in 10x09 we have the whole story about John saving Dean in the club, and that being a parenting story told for Cas’s benefit while he struggles to work out what to do with Claire. The story has mirrors to how he ends up saving her from herself in that episode, and paralleling Claire and Dean’s bad teenage decisions, since he was talking about himself as being close to her age.

…

wait - sidebar: Is Claire’s birthday on the 20th episode in season 10 because her episode was the 20th in season 4?

…

Anyway, of course that’s all early stuff for Cas being a parent in season 13 - that his story has always sort of loosely looped around themes of fatherhood, but at least to start with, in bad ways - only in 10x07 does he reconcile this and put himself on a beneficial emotional path by realising that he never lived up to his promise to protect Claire because he was too busy (UNDERSTANDABLY but still) and he is softened by her in new and unique ways and it seriously helped his character development and to explain how he was softening up etc. Claire calls him a doof on their next meeting, but she also does play a strong part in his continued softening up over that season; basically he got to a point where he was ready to deal with her again, and then she pulled him the rest of the way.

And this is the first episode that really goes back over ground for Cas that’s needed to reconcile him as a major character - 4x16 introduced him properly to the story as a major player rather than the exposition angel with his own arc etc, but this is the episode necessary to set Cas up that we now know everything necessary about him on a HUMAN level. How he came to be a part of the human world. The way he relates to humans outside of Sam and Dean… that he chooses to possess Jimmy instead of Claire out of agreement to his previous promise and less out of empathy to her, since he was planning to just walk off as Claire, and then also that he didn’t see anything particularly different about that. If Cas took Claire it would have made him somewhat irredeemable on the level that it would immediately parallel him to Lilith - and she’s still around in this season, even if she’s upgraded to an older vessel to avoid extra awful creepiness by this point in canon.

So I kind of see Claire and Cas bouncing off each other - this episode uses Claire to establish where Cas is at and a whole bunch of his emotional backstory, such as it is, and then in 10x09 Claire bounces off Cas and using this same inciting incident, now shows how it affected Claire and puts HER into the story as what will eventually be a main character of her own show.

-

I love Cas introducing himself through TV… some program about angels Jimmy fell asleep in front of and Cas switches the channel to watching from space.

-

Dean wanting to get rid of Jimmy so he can go home with his family :< He sees him as so innocent and so not part of the game… And Sam’s line about “Maybe Cas will drop back into him” and Dean’s like idk, and how defeated he is to have lost Cas. Again, I think I focused on this in my rewatch notes of this episode, but Sam’s mounting desperation for Ruby contrasted with Dean needing Cas back - both of them forsaken by their supernatural guides this episode

But Sam having a totally different, somewhat more logical and less emotional response to this when the issue is something bad happening to Cas. Dean is worried and upset and also miserable about it being Jimmy, as the sort of post-party realisation that the guy has a wife and kid kicks in. Just get rid of him and move on. Let him go be normal like they never get a chance to do…

But yeah this is just part of a loooong pattern of the different way Sam reacts in these sort of arguments/moral conundrums to Dean.

-

Hey, this hotel room has the same wallpaper but pinkish as Changing Channels

-

I love how Jimmy can be all scowly and angry but it’s all high pitched and utterly un-cas-like

-

I love that one scene where Cas pretends to be Jimmy and has to act going back up through his vocal cords and put on a more natural voice :P

-

I am basically just watching 10x09 in my head while all the other plot stuff goes on here.

-

Dean laughing about Sam losing Jimmy coming right after that argument makes me double down on him just not caring - Jimmy’s going back to his family, so what? Cas isn’t there, it’s not my problem any more. Sam’s all worked up because now he’s also responsible for Jimmy being in the danger that only he was immediately concerned about anyway. But yeah, even with all the demon blood nonsense he’s still seeing practicalities where Dean sees despair…

Not that this is commentary about season 13 at all

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OH NO CLAIRE DOING HER HOMEWORK

I was thinking about that before I started watching this, just because of how Dean tells her to “do her homework” when it’s about hunting, and not getting herself killed. I don’t know if I ever saw a gifset throwing back to how we once saw Claire all innocently doing her actual homework, but it’s always absolutely killed me because of the reference back to Claire’s innocence before she knew about the supernatural, and how she once was a kid who did her homework.

I think in the wider WS picture, that 11x12 was pretty interesting contrasting her and Alex that Alex wanted to go to school and Claire was struggling to even enrol because it was not the life that she wanted to live any more - she had been dragged so forcefully into the supernatural world after spending a whole bunch of time in the system that Amelia’s death is the last straw to make her tragic origin story round off and, fully orphaned, she starts her story as a hunter. But she wasn’t ALWAYS going in that direction - she was once a kid who did her homework, even when Jimmy had disappeared and she and Amelia were trying to make it on their own. The difference is knowing what had HAPPENED to Jimmy and how it was so much more incomprehensibly awful than what they thought had happened. Normal human responses to bad times to the kind of response when you find out your father or husband literally got possessed by an angel, and then you did or got possessed by a demon… Amelia’s breakdown sounds like it was also spiritual in nature and one thing I don’t think has ever really come up with Claire aside from the one mirrored line about praying in 10x09 is how religious she is any more, considering how religious her family was when she was young. I suppose she mirrors Dean in this respect as well, but we just haven’t had enough of her life to know how she feels about this. I hope WS explores it.

-

Aaaaand there’s Cas’s original promise that he’d look after Jimmy’s family as permission for possessing him.

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Hey did anyone make the parallel gifset of Cas looking at his hand like, weird, a hand, and Jack looking at his hand like, weird, a hand.

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OH NO CLAIRE, YOU SHOULD HAVE STAYED INSIDE WHEN YOU SAW ALL THE WEIRD ANGEL LIGHTS OUT HERE

I wonder if she always sort of knew. We’ve never really gone over her trauma of what Cas says to her here except the literal first exchange they have in 10x09 where it’s just clear that it HAS traumatised her but of course there’s a difference between talking about how she felt for that entire year in between Jimmy leaving and coming back, and the rest of her adolescence before Cas comes to help her, where she at least knew that the entire reason all that strangeness happened was because Jimmy had just been possessed by an angel with no social skills.

I’d love to hear her talk about it.

-

Something I’m thinking is the new characters (LIKE KAIA, WHO IS CONNECTED TO CLAIRE) offer a chance for the question to be asked - so how did YOU get into hunting? And I’m not joking about 4x20 now being Claire’s tragic origin story, when she was only once a fleeting character in it to get more pathos for what was going on here… I’d love to hear Claire talking about her take on her own life to someone else who has no connection whatsoever to the guys. At least not in that ridiculous Buckleming dialogue from 10x10 where she was also hiding the fact it was an angel who did all this to her. I’d love for her to talk openly about what Cas did and how that started her life off. I want others to kind of hear about Cas in passing but only insomuch as he affects CLAIRE’S life

-

But yeah, even though Jimmy talks almost entirely to Amelia in this episode, his actual experience seems to be so much more about Claire, because of what Cas said to her being the real bad how do I face them again trauma that takes it above and beyond just disappearing on them, and how the episode is eventually leading to her getting possessed, and his sacrifice specifically for her.

I’m way more interested in these themes passing through specifically in the context of season 13 and its themes doubled up with the Wayward Sisters thing just because there’s so much old ground and repeated themes here, but just enjoying the way the characters are so much a part of the show and its themes but also how easy it is to make them stand on their own. ALL you have to do is re-play this episode from Claire’s POV…

Like this bit where she comes down the stairs, and we have an almost in her eyes POV on her hand sliding hesitantly down the banister and her peering into the room to see her mom and estranged father talking, and how Amelia sends her away again, and her so Claire-like frustration that she’s being sent away when she just wants to see her father again. This is already telling some of this from Claire’s POV, at least in letting us see some tiny things which when she returns years later are all actual personality traits :P

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Awwww and Jimmy losing all his faith and saying how Heaven and Hell don’t matter and only Amelia and Claire are important  
waaaah

-

I love that Claire has her hair in a braid over the front, or pinned back to the side… It’s quite a generic style but I like that it’s another little character continuity thing - that she does sometimes have this style, and even the really dramatic braids she had when she first came back were like the grown up angsty rebellious teen version of her cute little girl style… I think I wrote a bit about it back after 10x09

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The original Claire actress isn’t nearly as outgoing as KLN, and I guess she is pre-trauma, but even if they look quite similar they reaaally don’t act like it. She’s all “why are you crying” with no nuance except “hi i am a cute kid”. She isn’t anywhere near over-dramatic enough to be the Claire I’ve come to know and love :P

-

Once again the demon attacking them makes it about gutting Claire and not mentioning except implicitly how Amelia will be hurt too - it’s all about Jimmy losing CLAIRE because he came back into her life after trying to return home.

-

The ONLY reason Cas had a trenchcoat from this episode onward is because demon-possessed Amelia grabbed it on the way out the door, probably because brand recognition. Like, if you’re going to abduct the vessel of *Castiel* you better grab all the parts just to make sure :P Maybe the bosses downstairs won’t recognise him if you don’t dress him up in it… hahahaha

-

It’s very possible that Amelia did it and the demon grabbed her after she grabbed the trenchcoat.

-

Awww no and they sleep together in the back of the Impala… Claire has now entered Trauma Town but this is a nice moment with her mom (so she thinks) and she’s probably drawing a lot of comfort from her but this time is so nearly over - this might be the last time she had even a half-way nice moment with Amelia. And then it turns out she was possessed and smacks Claire :< And Sam’s making ultimatums about how their family will never be put back together.

(He’s so broken right now but this isn’t really the point)

-

*stares sadly at Claire sleeping under the trenchcoat*

*thinks about Cas hugging her in 10x09 in the back of the Impala*

HE WILL PROTECT HER

THIS AWFULNESS ONLY APPLIES FOR LIKE 6 SEASONS AND THEN IT GETS BETTER

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Can we trust Amelia crying while apologising to Jimmy? Idk if a demon can act that well… Perhaps it did kinda tag along in her subconscious or something but was letting her drive for a while at least until an opportune moment to strike. On the other hand she was giving Claire a really weird look in the backseat before Jimmy popped in to chat.

Jimmy, also, of course, getting terrible, tainted last moments with his family. That hug and sandwiches moment is the last good pure moment for them >.>

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She says she will go with Jimmy and she won’t split up from him again - honestly if this WAS her then she did kinda seem to behave like she would off-screen between her 2 episodes. Jimmy trying to break up with her and saying she has to go away as far as she can… If she was only possessed between this scene and Sam getting them the car then fair enough, tbh. She looks like she would go charging after him anyway, if only she could.

-

It’s so weird watching this episode and totally tuning out Dean and especially Sam. This is like… The Worst Sam Episode, except i’m just here to stare sadly at Claire.

Like Jimmy saying goodbye to her and telling her… oh no… to look after her mom. So there’s the seed which sets Claire on the path we find her in 10x20… She sort of takes Cas freeing her from the “child prison” as her emancipation to finally go on this quest, and… Oh gosh she’s so smol and sad right now. She’s just a little girl. :< We know nothing about her except she does her homework, has cute hair, and misses her dad.

I mean it’s a weird character intro when you think about it but we know her from so far back it’s like having friends with a kid and then you don’t see them for 6 years and then suddenly the kid has a whole personality and interests and you’re like, I remember when you were basically just a generic kid from the Sims. 10x09 definitely kinda creates the concept of Claire as anything other than a cute kid who is a token in this battle, even though she’s central to this particular part of the story.

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“Why is he leaving again?” Claire is just so smol and terrified and the entire world is shifting around her and she’s not even going to have a proper grasp on this yet and maybe not for ages - maybe not until she’s handed off to the grandma who was mentioned earlier so Amelia can go on her quest and suddenly when the dust settles Claire realises she is all alone in the world and her parents abandoned her, and it’s because demons attacked her family all because of Castiel, the angel who probably got her consent to possess her by doing the same as Jimmy - promising to protect her family.

(I hate that this was done off-screen NOW for Claire’s sake but really, 6 years too late by the time it’s relevant and maybe they ought to have just written Claire yelling at Cas what he promised her like Jimmy is about to do.)

And she’s going to start praying to him to come back and do what he promised :<

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LOL sorry to keep coming back to The Man Pain but behind Dean in this car argument, Jimmy is asleep and in his side of the car seeming to snooze on Dean’s shoulder, just like in 13x02 Jack was seeming to snooze on Sam’s shoulder. Basically, Jimmy is Dean’s problem - his specific emotional burden.

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OH NO here is Jimmy’s Castiel you son of a bitch speech

I love it

I sometimes forget that Misha has done like half of the scenes structured like this. Because I literally forget that he also played Jimmy and this wasn’t some other guy :P

The scenes in question are all begging parental figures for help except this one per se - idk what any of the technical terms are but they do a heartfelt plea and they cut the dialogue and close ups/different camera angles so the speech overlaps or starts before the shot it’s connected to, creating a really disjointed, sad plea to make the desperation really more obvious. The first is Dean looking for Sam in 2x14 where he’s on the phone to Ellen begging for info about him. The second is Dean in 2x20 yelling at John’s grave about why he has to save all the people. The other one is 6x20 and Cas asking God if he’s on the right path. So yeah. A lovely collection of AWFUL scenes for your consideration :P

I love that Cas has had it both ways though - being prayed to with such awful pain and being the one in the hot seat doing the praying. This is Jimmy truly losing faith, because not only has his family now been utterly destroyed, but Cas doesn’t even immediately answer his prayer after he makes it, so all he can do is say “typical” and storm off to go try and get his family back.

It’s interesting hopping from 1x09 to 4x20 because of the odd connection of prayers and phone calls. I’ve just had to survive Dean’s phone call to John where he begs him to come help and John might be listening but he isn’t coming to help.

Cas actually DOES answer the prayer but goes to Claire for convenience, like, basically just to get the sneak attack bonus, and tells Jimmy, in his spooky talking for heaven voice that of course he cares and would look after his family etc - he’s just doing it all in a super creepy way because he hasn’t learned all the human pain and empathy yet, and so he’s trying to answer the prayer. I think it’s maybe like a few points better than John’s handling of it, and in this context Cas definitely wins out as the better father figure… If he’s being compared against John even just in the visual framing (never mind 10x09 and the way they deliberately connect all the parent figures - Cas, Rowena, John, Claire’s other random dad for the week…)

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NOOO don’t shoot Jimmy! He Is Doing His Best

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YEAAAAH WELCOME BACK CAS I MISSED YOU

Can you please come back in present canon too, because  I am in agony and watching this episode first of any Cas episode since the new season began is SUPER WEIRD AND PAINFUL

Jimmy is doing to my heart what Cas being around Claire was doing for HERS re: Jimmy. YOU LOOK LIKE HIM BUT YOU’RE NOT HIM

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I love Cas standing next to Dean in tiny little Claire, being Cas still, but like… Tiny.

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Cas just… standing there… in the demon… as it’s being exorcised.

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“Of course WE keep our promises, of course you have OUR gratitude, you’ve served US well…”

Cas what have they dooone to you (well that’s answered in season 8 but it HURTS us to watch)

Cas truly believes that Jimmy - who was once devout - will be happy to go to Heaven and his forever rest. Jimmy has had a harsh lesson that family is more important, and no way in HELL he’s going to let Claire suffer what he has while possessed by Cas. (I mean - wise move, she’d have been blown up in 2 episodes and died.) I think it’s awful but at the same time one of the best things anyone has done on the show even if it messed Claire up forevers, because oh man, the parallel to John, again, is just incomparable. It’s not a trade off like the one he made where he basically conceded the fight to Azazel and just *hoped* Dean would be strong enough to bear everything AND finish the fight without the Colt? Jimmy has no bargaining chip except his own life and he has already accepted he has to be out of the life of his family forever… Becoming Cas again is the ONLY way to protect them and Claire is not just IN danger, she’s literally already good-as-dead as long as Cas is inside her… It’s not like Dean in a hospital bed where Tessa was telling him about the natural order off in the corner… Season 10 deals with the EMOTIONAL scars this causes the family but he already made his bad decision a year ago: the fault and the damage tracks back to THAT, not to this specific deal to save Claire from this fate. It’s a GENUINELY good and pure sacrifice for family, after he was tricked by Cas in a way - that Cas was not capable of protecting them as well as he seemed to promise, that angels aren’t all-powerful to literally sit on someone’s shoulder the rest of their lives…

And 10x07’s last moments, and 10x09’s stuff, really deals with how Cas feels belatedly, with hindsight, AFTER being human, after realising the damage angels cause to their vessels… After Hannah makes him think about his own vessel for the first time in years as anything other than “huh I’m not dead” levels of contemplating its existence…

And reconnecting with that family and trying to fulfil the promises that he made in BAD FAITH, that Jimmy saw clearly WHAT Cas was, didn’t believe the hype, the weird company line Cas comes back reciting, but HAD to go through with it anyway, not out of faith or belief in angels or that he was special that Cas hyped him up with for the first round, but because it protected Claire…

I feel like that promise was woven into Cas’s very being in this scene, and I think by 10x20 he gets a genuine sort of peace and fulfilment from having helped guide Claire and see his own mistakes, the damage he wrought on this family, clearly.

And then Claire is also freed and gets in that taxi and goes to live her LIFE.

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And she’s freed right now… Cas says “as you wish” which is kinda hilarious because it’s the Princess Bride line but he uses “of course” for Dean in the same manner. Like, there’s cultural connotations here, Carver. What are you doing.

It tickles me it’s different for Dean though.

I am so distraught about this hand over because it’s such a bad situation and Cas and Jimmy sort of both bring a whole lot of shitty circumstances to the table in the sense that none of this would be happening specifically to this family if Jimmy said no and in general if Cas hadn’t, but it was literally never in the cards that that wouldn’t happen, and Cas is currently coerced by Heaven anyways as he does all this, full on robo-Cas to the extreme that we only really see here and in 8x17 or 8x10 because we so RARELY have seen him completely under Naomi’s thumb. This is a battle choice, and that’s what makes it all suck.

And why the Claire arc in season 10 was SO GOOD and of all the odd stuff happening in that season, shines out as a series of genuinely good writing choices and things which sort of begin to seriously purify all the badness of the earlier part of the show.

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I super love Claire’s glowing gold eyes but then they are blue again briefly as Cas arrives back in Jimmy.

-

Anyway bye Claire. Cas stares at Claire hugging Amelia and his face is blank and like, welp, fixed it, that’s it.

And that IS it.

His “I serve heaven, I don’t serve man” is completely backwards to the Cas we know and love, who loves humanity, and will go heal random babies, but aside from the following part of that - and I don’t serve you - that makes it SPECIFICALLY about Dean in the reverse of the 12x12 love confession (ahaha and I was groaning about Jimmy lying on the floor groaning from a wound in just about the same place as Cas got stabbed, but I was trying to avoid mentioning The Man Pain again) - this is also about how his “responsibility” to Amelia and Claire has ended with him freeing them from the demons and allowing Claire to go back to her mother. Nothing else is important to him after that point because he has to storm off and do Heaven’s bidding. It’s just… such an awful way for him to leave. Amelia moves towards him and Cas breezes past because they’re not married - and this is the only contact she ever has with Cas except for after he saves her from the Grigori in 10x20… And yeah, he looks over his shoulder at them but whatever he feels about these promises - if he briefly did feel bad about it - he has to remember. He doesn’t serve them. He serves Heaven.

What an awful, darkest place for Cas…

And I can’t watch Dean haul him out of it in a couple of episodes because I got to skip right to my next episode and the next Tragic Backstory In Motion :P


	3. 5x15: JODY IS HERE TO STEAL THE SHOW SINCE IT TAKES SO LONG TO GIVE HER HER OWN ONE

It’s so nice to switch to a story again where moms are the focus, and this episode is not about fathers except in the usual way Bobby around the guys is. Karen as the wife and potential but missed-out-on mom that the guys never had, and we meet our next main cast member as a mom who has already lost everything once and has to lose it all over again in the sort of cruel and unusual trauma where it’s going to feel like they’re one-upping each other for backstory until we crash into Donna and her important to her but not like… monsters causing horrific unnatural psychological scarring life :P She’s really gonna be needed as a breezy counterpoint.

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It’s also so weird to enthusiastically leap into a Jody episode and NOT have Jody recapped, just as a personal expectation of the content I am about to consume. :P

Oh no Cas has some voice over in the recap

The season 5 recaps are absolutely AWFUL, especially when you just fling yourself right into the middle of the apocalypse with no build up. This is the MOST AWFUL. Everyone is dead, including the Jo and Ellen explosion, I have to look at Lucifer’s face, and it ends on Dean’s “I need some help” prayer which asdskdfg can I go a single episode in this rewatch without having to remember 13x01 and The Everything Prayer?

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It occurs to me as well that Carver introduced both Claire and Jody as his original characters and then brought them back in his showrunning era, and let them survive, and Alex and Donna are both from season 9, after season 8 only brought back Jody in the worst way.

I’m so glad he did better than season 8 because it was super depressing and the sudden uptick in What We Want is REALLY VISIBLE in season 9

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Jodyyy!!!! I am almost certain I’ve written these exact words in my rewatch notes for this episode before, but blah blah here she comes first lines are her being a mom to her zombie child. She’s telling him what to eat - a healthy apple, not a dessert - and it’s about food, without making it weird and ominous that his unhealthy choice is going to be HER HUSBAND’S GUTS. On the level of innocuous opening lines it’s just one notch below “you’re a sight for sore eyes” when they meet Pamela.

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She’s obviously coded as a sweet and friendly sheriff because moms in this show who show this kind of nice attention to their kids are pretty much universally good characters overall. She looks young, assertive, friendly… We’re meant to immediately like her, even when she is blatantly wrapped up in the mystery of the town, because she seems sweet so what could possibly be going on beneath this bubbly top layer?

Well, we have never met her before so WE don’t know what it was like for her after her son died but before he came back. She’s behaving like Bobby is when Sam and Dean get to his house, BUT WE DON’T KNOW IT YET. The considerably more hardened, snarky, but still obviously good at heart Jody that we meet in pretty much all the other episodes is what lurks under her surface.

Again for a character intro of course she’s a side character right now to these guys’s show and won’t start seriously asserting herself as a POV character until 9x19 sidelines the Winchesters almost completely as POV or moral centre in favour of introducing Alex to Jody’s life. Her intro right now is for the one-off episode as the most interesting of the ridiculous townsfolk and their comedic reaction to the zombies (and the only one we see actually incur any trauma aside from Bobby). And she probably only initially comes back because she’s established as the local law-enforcement to Bobby’s fixed set. It’s when Robbie brings her back twice in season 7 AFTER Bobby’s house burns down that she becomes established as transcending her original role, so that’s 2 seasons away right now.

Still, I love basically every single moment Jody is on screen and I know the excellent soul that lurks inside this character… Knowing WHY she is so happy and cute to start with is the absolute worst part of coming back here with long form hindsight >.>

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I LOVE how antagonistic Jody IMMEDIATELY turns when it becomes clear that the “FBI” is investigating the dead guy who did the murder. She KNOWS, remember, that zombies have popped up all over town, so she turns on them and starts interrogating their credentials - forcing Dean into the fake FBI persona even harder and seriously how did they ever all become friends :P - because if she can’t drive them out of town fast, they’re going to come around asking questions about Owen. She probably thinks they’re journalists, although she’s already been through the round of acceptance needed for realising Owen is back and not to question it, just enjoy having her son again, so she is presumably at least somewhat worried they might actually know what’s going on and be here to stop it.

Mama bear Jody being mama bear about her own son, basically. So her entire intro scene is subtextually about Jody’s strongest character trait when it comes to WHY we even have a Wayward Sisters in the first place - she is the absolute heart of it because she’s such a great, complex character. And honestly, on this show, a motherly character of such interesting layers without getting killed off but being developed over and over and not always ABOUT the motherly role she has but about her as a hunter or just as a person out in this strange world they inhabit… Yeah. Shh you didn’t hear it from me but Jody Mills saved Supernatural and she’s been working hard on it since her near-death experience at the end of season 8.

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“…. bullcrap”.

I love her so so so so so so so much.

I love how she just demolishes their entire attempt to investigate and calls out their entire game of FBI. They know Bobby so they are some weirdo guys who are here to cause trouble and she’s not having it!

I think it goes nicely with how in many cases the female law enforcement they bond with is generally quite stoic but gets on board with the nonsense when the nonsense hits the fan… in Jody’s case she actually already KNOWS about the zombies, and is a step ahead of them as the local law enforcement who is PROTECTING the zombies, which puts her in such an interestingly unique position it’s like her entire character gets to zoom ahead into strange territory where she will be memorable and not have trodden the same ground as the kind of cops they bond with either side of her appearance. Donna also stands out as being more of a character than a tool in the story.

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NOW we get to Bobby also deflecting Sam and Dean, and being unusually clean and well-dressed. I love this episode because it explores the sort of mindset of this town, which has been inflicted with zombies and people by and large have had to come to accept this happened… Bobby deflecting about the town drunk and how it all means nothing is thrown back at him (or, to Sam) later in the episode, showing it’s all lies and misdirection, and that the town really has rallied around their loved ones returning from the dead. (I’m sure Jody having Owen restored to her was a tactic by Death to have the sheriff on their side, which is awful when you think about it…) I just… I laugh so hard at the taxpayer line from that one zombie, and it’s all a part of the total nonsense that is created around them of what happens when the dead rise and the people are just like… actually we kinda want them back and they’re not hurting anyone (except sometimes the people who killed them and we can kinda understand that) so… why not.

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And Jody just comes in like yep let’s arrest Sam and Dean for threatening to shoot the guy in the street.

She knows the deal - it’s now clear she’s “in” on it, which NOW bounces back her first scene compared to Bobby’s to make Bobby even more suspicious that she knew all along and is unfazed by the zombie…

It does also bring up the very HUMAN issue of when you kill someone for being a monster and when they deserve it. I find it interesting that the show has had a lot of different takes on zombies - the more murdery ones are animated with dark power and that’s it (4x07) or basically are characterised exactly like soulless people, in the brought back wrong sense (2x04) but these ones are brought back wrong with their bodies decaying and a supernatural hunger, but their souls clearly intact despite that.

I’m also now thinking about Jody as an antagonist and how that bounces off Missouri from pt.1 of this rewatch… She also obscured the truth from them, and you can make a loose parallel here of Jody knowing about the zombies and Bobby sitting at home knowing about it too but keeping the truth from them for the time being - extremely selfishly in this case. This episode has everyone acting irrationally, but in a HUMAN way about HUMAN feelings, and it makes it very different from if they were all bespelled to act irrationally. This is deep down stuff.

And finally we see Bobby and Jody talking and aaaall the pieces fall into place.

Jody’s irrational behaviour is now excused by seeing how Bobby has been handling it all and what he is hiding back at home and all Bobby has to do is mention that Owen came back from the dead and it’s just… oh.

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There’s so much about food in this episode, which is possibly why Carver era in general has a whole bunch of food imagery as well… Although Dabb seems to have mostly handled the pie thing aside from this episode :P  Jody comes in telling Owen to eat healthy food, Karen is making pie (and if you go in my tag for this episode you will find a very long meta about Mary and Karen Singer’s Zombie Pie, which is mainly why I think this episode is SO much about motherhood), and all the zombies are huuungry.

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Bobby talking obliviously about how Karen doesn’t remember - more secrets held back. And she’s holding back the plot stuff too. She’s the only one who knows WHY this is all happening, but she’s just going about these patterns pretending it’s all okay and she can bake pies through the apocalypse…

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Blargh, the obligatory shot of Jody, her husband - who is the most generic boring white guy dad ever - and her son reading together. She looks so happy. I know how self-analytical she is from later episodes but like Claire being a kind of un-formed Sims Child from the character creation screen, Jody is still very one dimensional here, and we’re not getting her inner thoughts about it all. I wonder if it was only later - even only really in 9x19 when Alex made her finally confront it all - that she realised just how she had been filling a hole by having Owen back for a few days, and how she’d always sort of known something was wrong but like everyone else in the town, when it seemed like it was REALLY her Owen, she couldn’t just kill him or reject him no matter how messed up he seemed by coming back from the dead. Because she has ALREADY been through losing him once, and we’re seeing her in this happy bubble when she has him back… I think the way she handles adopting Alex is incredibly emotionally mature after “Mom” vamp calls her out on it earlier… With time to reflect, she approaches Alex extremely carefully, knowing she’s got attached, but, well, having already filled the hole once…

Ugh she has such a sweet smile on her face.

-

I paused it right on Dean’s reaction after “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you’ve never been in love” and I am full of suffering. I am a WORLD of suffering.

If this was in season 10 Dean’s expression would have just been FLOORED. If it was in season 7-9 it would have been uncomfortable and ambiguous.

In season 11 he’s told he’s in love and he laughs so nervously and then does the eyebrows about the lucky lady…

If we got this line now he’d probably start crying tbh

-

He’s moved by this, sure, but… Yeah.

-

Sticky zombies killing the mood.

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“You think you could tell me from here?”

This is one of those great episodes which balances the comedy and the horror really well. I think 13x01 is one of those other perfectly tuned episodes and there are not a whole lot of them. Just the ones you’d say are The Greats.

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Sam has to keep this jacket because they use this exterior shot of him arriving at the house like 3 times after this, but he wiped all the zombie goo onto the sleeve. What sort of punishment are the writers inflicting on him?

Sorry, sorry, trying to keep The Man Pain out of this but I have limits. :P

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Jody saying “I know, I know” about how hungry Owen is, but she doesn’t know. She’s making him soup and crackers, and ignoring all the signs.

And yet more casual absurdity - that they call up the doctor for medical advice for their sickly zombified son. The doctor is probably either a zombie himself or has some returned love ones himself.

-

And Karen like “I’m so hungry, I just need something to eat” while vomiting…

-

Jody failing to explain what’s wrong to the doc because THIS IS NOT SOMETHING ANYONE CAN HANDLE

-

Noooooooo OWEN :<

Oh Jody

-

I love that she got such a long horrified reaction shot. I love that they gave Kim all this space to act. They could have just had her shriek, but she gets several lines to work through everything and again it’s sort of the needs of the story - they needed a sheriff just because this was a town wide thing and she’d be the authority figure. They need to make her know about the zombies both for the absurdity and so that she’s on their side. They need to have her somewhat in action for the end of the episode, so she needs to get her shit together and listen to Sam now… It’s just… like, the episode is demanding all this of her character as she is only a side character, shaped to fit the needs of the bigger narrative, but the wackiness (and now enormous horror that’s caught up to them) reeeeally gives her room to move with this character and she is AMAZING at this part.

(Also Sam in this part and… argh. Sam and Jody need to hang out more - I am so glad they fought together in 12x22, because it’s just… my favourite thing)

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OH GOSH and the silent part where Sam gets out his gun and Jody grabs his arm and just LOOKS at it with HORROR but she knows he has to do it

and she just stands there

and oh god

this whole bit

i wish I could gif more easily from DVDs.

I might do it anyway.

I can’t even describe how incredibly well-acted the entire thing was from Kim. She is a TREASURE. I mean I think I’ve kinda thought it would be cool for her to have her own show just because of 6x04 because I thought she’d be interesting enough JUST off of 2 episodes… But yeah by season 9 it’s blatant that if there’s a breakout character from this show (who isn’t so embedded in TFW aka Cas) who could carry a spin off…

I NEED WAYWARD SISTERS SO BADLY. I’m 3 episodes into this and I’m incoherent.

-

I’m 5 minutes through the zombie attack on Bobby’s and it occurs to me it’s basically Bugs re-done but like… better in every way. Same basic concept though

-

And yay Jody comes in and helps save their butts with Sam.

She looks so different and hardened just by this point in her story… Now she is a warrior again like them, and that grief has to settle on her shoulders and she lets Owen go once more. :(

-

They ask (at the pyre the next morning that her son and husband may or may not be on) how the townsfolk are - she is in a position of authority, back in her uniform… she has to put the town ahead of herself - bury herself in work as she says later - and now she talks about how they’re traumatised without allowing herself into it, even though she was just as much a part of it as they were.

At this end of episode Jody talking to Sam about it moment, it’s next to impossible to separate this just being a new but firmly established side character due a million more episodes talking to them, rather than The Random Cop Of The Week

-

Finally Sam asks how Jody herself is holding up, and she just can’t answer. It’s amazing. She is the best.

-

Guh I don’t wanna have to gif all this.

I love her so so so so much.

I think I already said that but now I’m super focused on Jody :P

I’m going to go gif all that.

(Oh no Dean said he didn’t know anything about love… I am SO SAD.)

Bobby says it makes things 1000x worse to have had her back briefly… This is a terrible reflection on how Jody is also feeling. But. Like…

Cas is currently dead and Dean keeps briefly getting him back and then Cas is GONE and DEAD again

… go away, The Man Pain, we’re focussing on the girls.

Gonna skip to 6x04 now because season 5 is a sausagefest. How do you construct a story which has 3 teams of 4 dudes, plus a bunch of extra dudes on the side because that wasn’t enough dudes.


	4. 6x04: JODY CHOOSES THE WAYWARD PATH

(also this episode is about Bobby or something)

I am always kinda annoyed that after the initial introduction there are only two more episodes exploiting that Jody is a local sheriff named character who knows about the supernatural. It’s incredible to me that literally only in the second half of season 12 onward Sam and Dean actually refer to calling Jody to help them with police stuff on the reg…

Anyway. Still in season 6 where her solitary appearance is about the best thing to happen in the entire season.

Dabbflin are digging in deep on Bobby in one of those episodes which I have been yelling about for 1000 years but I’m not entirely sure everyone is on the same page when I want to talk your ear off at a party about how it tells you everything you need to know about the story callbacks on a grand scale in Dabb era. This episode mirrors itself, it plays on the episodes around it, and it is ultimately a giant mirror image/photo negative of one of the most important episodes of the entire season.

Jody and Rufus just kinda chill in this episode being their magnificent selves, and I think the entire thing is just beautiful.

I think it really helps that this is another one of the utterly iconic episodes the show has done, and now Jody is one of the most watchable season 5 episodes, and the iconic season 6 episode that, nonsense about souls and stuff aside, can basically be put on as easy viewing even for new viewers or whatever. For just 2 episodes, she DOES feel established once you get to season 7, possibly just because it’s an “oh gosh she’s still alive and around, isn’t it great to have an established character with roots in the show who ISN’T DEAD to talk to”

This is basically the growing roots episode.

-

Technically I don’t need to watch all of it but this is such a classic I’m not gonna skip it :P

-

This episode doesn’t pass the bechdel test and the closest it gets is the demon in Bobby’s basement yelling trying to get Marcie to hear it. Come to think of it, none of the episodes have yet - I think the conversation about the sexy doctor in 7x02 is the first time >.>

-

Marcie is sweet though… Cute and bubbly and loves cooking and flowers and stuff, but she also loves horror movies. I honestly think if better circumstances she might have been good for Bobby, as the kind of soul that might have been able to get to know him for who he really is.

Of course because this is the Worst Rewatch, I’m going IMMEDIATELY from Bobby re-mourning Karen to THIS so UGH. Because the demon goes back to mocking Bobby about killing Karen in the first place.

Because the show goes in such certain loops there are always things which come up again and again and it’s just weird how certain episodes if you watch them for one random reason end up mirroring each other.

Bobby’s phone montage with “not me the FBI the real FBI” is cut like that prayer of Jimmy’s I got really into, but with none of the dramatic weight it turns it comedic.

How is Garth still alive.

“Oh good you’re home, help me bury a body.” Rufus returning to the story is excellent. Just like, dropping on in on Bobby, and I think this is the first time they use him comically - he’s had some hilarious lines but in really weighty scenes, and I’m pretty sure this one episode sort of flipped his entire character purpose, so in all his subsequent appearances he’s no longer the grim “this is what you’ve got waiting for you if you survive” guy Dean once faced off with, but it’s like the apocalypse gave him a new lease on life. Maybe it was because it was all hands on deck, and once he was back in the game it just sort of gave him a taste of how it used to be - I don’t think he would have reconciled with Bobby to the degree he did except that Bobby kept badgering him for help all through season 4 and 5 off-screen.

-

Tbh because this episode is SO much about Bobby I wouldn’t NEED to watch it for Jody except I really love seeing her on screen. She basically does nothing except assert that she’s a fun character to have around and that she IS around (and hisssss then she’s not in the entire rest of the season). At the moment she’s basically silent, probably because she is toeing the line between having an actual special agent nosing around and knowing she and Bobby almost certainly know more about what might be going on than he ever would… And that she WOULD help him if it came down to it, because of the zombie thing… She’s acting like this bloke’s judgemental shadow right now. But she’s trapped having to keep quiet, and it is a thing about her being between worlds - having a tie to both obeying the law and doing her job, but also understanding that Bobby’s line of work is important and this guy almost certainly has it wrong.

-

I love her “zip up” comment because when she DOES step in she just immediately uses the Mom Voice to put them both in their place and de-escalate… Her blase approach to Bobby’s lifestyle, calling him a crank, when his walls are PAPERED in occult weirdness, is possibly my favourite part of her characterisation here. Just like, ignore everything, make it about  men being men and not that she knows a whole ton of weirdness beyond the pale is probably going on here…

-

And she’s just so accepting of the idea that Bobby’s house and yard are full of dead bodies. And she knows that’s just today!

It’s a lot of quick and dirty character building stuff. Just like, well we all know 5x15 happened, but what’s happened in the year since? Jody’s had to deal with all that loss again, and she’s hard at work, back to seemingly normal, but she now has a deeper understanding with Bobby. She might not be IN the life, but she knows it’s all out there, and Bobby really does have a blank cheque to do whatever he wants within reason, so long as she can be sure it’s all in the interest of protecting everyone from monsters. She TRUSTS him. He admits there’s dead bodies - because he knows he can trust her and she will trust him not to just be randomly murdering people but to have some great monster hunting purpose to it all.

-

I love the little stand off as well where she and Bobby walk out together and meet the guy and he confronts them about the, uh, septic tank.

-

There’s a random day to night time skip here where Bobby phones Rufus urgently… but only after he’s gone from full daylight to total dark. Oh Dabb.

-

Aaaand that’s Fargo Reference No.2!

-

Actually, there are probably more… I’ve seen the movie like 5 times but not for several years/while actively being into SPN, so there might be more subtle things. I wonder if they’ll still do it any more in WS because it’s just a joke in a sort of “hey look it’s Jody and we’re so funny let’s drive this reference into the ground” sort of way… Not that I mind because I love the movie and it tickles me, but it’s fairly inaccurate to apply to Jody.

(I also haven’t seen it recently enough to really comment on the themes/handling of it, but the sheriff is preggers throughout the movie, and Jody obviously never is… It IS more themes of motherhood though, that the BAMF sheriff is unabashedly an expectant mother. Jody also is connected to motherhood without actually having a child around her any more since Owen re-died, and until Alex comes along. She’s still one of the motherly characters but it’s just a character thing for her, and by far not the whole part of her personality. I mean, Dean got called mom in this episode when Bobby was telling him how to roast a lamia, which is more mother references than Jody gets this time…)

(Also I’m p. sure Fargo took place in a different state from this, even if it was just like 1 over or something?)

-

LOL Rufus is in front of Donna’s Diner in the next scene. I’m calling that a lovely omen in this rewatch.

-

Asdfghk Gavin! Not a part of this rewatch, I’m just still bitter after 12x13 :P

This poor poor episode does not deserve the ridiculous plot hole buckleming put in it so I’m just gonna assume an AU springs up once Abaddon grabs Gavin out of his proper time, but since it hadn’t happened yet at this point, life is preceding as normal

-

Meanwhile: Dean is making his angsty call because asdfghjkls;d remember what I was saying about never being able to escape The Man Pain? Look I gotta say this is another one of those things looping around and I just happen to be hitting a ton of (but not all) the episodes which relate to this sort of thing… 1x09 Dean reaches out to John and John isn’t answering but hears his answerphone message and goes to Missouri pretty much just to not answer Dean’s call or let him know he’s there but in close proximity. Now this is all played somewhat comic at first, cutting it with Rufus, but also once Bobby gets talking, it’s all about Bobby because it’s HIS episode, and we’re by now deeply entrenched in seeing it through his eyes, and Dean’s technically saying nothing new in his angst, because this episode should really just be about Bobby. But it’s more painful that Dean DOES reach out and this is a similar moment of waiting to be alone and making an emotional plea over the phone for help, emotional support, whatever Dean feels he can’t do alone when dealing with what he doesn’t know is soulless Sam yet. And Bobby - who we are meant to root for in this episode and have now seen over 20 minutes of his life to get us firmly embedded in that mindset, reacts strongly about having his own life and problems and rejects The Man Pain far more directly than John or God not answering, because Bobby was always immediate and close and at least you could get a surly answer out of him even if it wasn’t supportive, which I suppose for Dean is still welcoming in comparison >.>

-

Could probably write a lot more but this is not a The Man Pain rewatch, and Dean’s like “but what about Sam” and it’s hanging a lampshade on how HE is self-centred to bother Bobby. Like, deliberately putting some words in his mouth that to the Bobby POV we’re in come across completely as the wrong thing to say - trying to drag the episode into being about someone who literally is barely in the episode and has nothing to do with its plot for once.

Dean also says he doesn’t know which way is up which I swear Buckleming wrote a similar line about in 13x02

okay okay shelving The Man Pain

-

HERE WE GO Jody rolls up to check out why Bobby called her out to chat, and she tells him that helping him with Rufus would “nuke her career”, clearly stating that there are limits she has between letting Bobby off for local crimes which are obviously monster-related, like not filing Marcie’s complaint, and risking her own career on his shenanigans.

Bobby pulls the card that he’s been helping the town a long time - things she doesn’t know about, and things she does which is blatantly a reminder about the stuff with the zombies, which is his card to remind Jody of how he knows about that tragic backstory, and that they are bonded a little about it, because of course he lost Karen too in that incident.

She says she can’t, which is obviously the whole refusing the call thing where the hero picks the safer, less-challenging path…

but then knock knock, it’s a pissed off looking Jody with a Rufus, and by having it go from one scene to the next shows that Jody didn’t really need to sit on this one so much as she needed a few minutes to think and all, but it’s not just owing stuff to Bobby… Now she’s making active decisions to do things off the grid - to step away from shadowing the authorities when they show up and trying to stay in line with them, to talk to Bobby like law enforcement, but to be that friend who he can tell about the bodies in his basement and yard. And it’s an important, powerful moment for Jody, even if all the focus is on Bobby’s needs still and Rufus is a wee bit of a scene stealer (I love him so much but sadly this is not the Rufus Watch)… This is showing her choice and she’s now like the cops that have helped the Winchesters in other episodes, but she just did this for Bobby… And it’s that first step into being more than the local cop in the know, but an ally and someone who can be relied on not just as an authority figure who’ll tidy up the minor scrapes, but who can abuse that position of power to help hunt.

It’s going to take Dr Monster Face to turn Jody entirely into being curious about the job, and losing Bobby to spur her on even more, but this is her first real step away from the obvious good reactions to take in a situation that showed her potential, and just diving right in with all this nonsense, and letting it be something that affects her serious choices, and that she’ll put the greater good above her job. Because she has now recognised that her job does NOT cover all the aspects of protecting people that it should - that there are gaps in the law that don’t allow for the existence of monsters…

She’s crossed over the line :D

-

I mean she literally gives Bobby an hour and then threatens to call the feds, and that she’ll give Bobby hell if it comes back to slap her in the face,  but she needs a little kinda shove out the door to doing these things, and okay so they leave her an entire season before she comes back with a fighting spirit towards monsters… The important thing is that Jody just reacted to the zombie thing - this is her making a CHOICE

I mean give her a break her show is literally 7 seasons away from this :P

-

Blah blah epic Crowley and Bobby showdown. I was busy typing and not looking at the screen, and Gavin sounds remarkably the same if you don’t look at the screen.

I’m still kinda bitter :P

-

*Dean flicks his bic for Crowley*

Honestly, the amount of homoerotic banter they pack into this…

-

And Dabb finishes off his metaphor episode with Bobby not getting his dessert because he has work to do. Ah, man, do not watch this back to back with 5x15. You’re asking for heart trouble.


	5. 7x02: JODY VS DR MONSTERFACE

This is now the stretch of this rewatch where I get increasingly frustrated with how Jody appears sporadically and we’re hopping from appearance to appearance all the way to season 9 and we’ve just had to leap across all of season 6… She’s an established familiar presence by the end of season seven - the fact of her season 8 single short appearance is then beyond frustrating to me especially since if there were ever a season she could have comfortably fit in, it would be season 8.

I mean, man, fix-it no weird argument about a dog season 8 fluff fic where Sam went and crashed with Jody after 7x23 and stayed there until Dean got back. And then she was there for them the rest of the season. She even knew about their weirdo cabin they were still staying in for the first part of the season. How long did it take for them to get back in contact after that year out of the job??

-

I have time to kill before yoga, but not enough time to watch 13x03, so I’m gonna do about the worst possible thing… Watch the opening of 7x02 D:

I could just skip because I want to skip to Jody’s parts anyway

I’m just torturing myself with The Man Pain

So let’s watch Cas walking into a lake first thing on a Friday morning

-

This so does not sell Dean losing Cas in the same way 13x01 did… Or even other times later. He still has the presence of mind to assess what’s going on with the leviathan tearing apart Cas’s vessel, and to go run and get Sam and deal with him. I mean… 13x01 was *alarming*

The trenchcoat thing is just a bonus feels punch in the middle of everything. Like the sad music starts up again AFTER a gloomy conversation about the plot.

“Okay. So he’s gone.” *voice wobble* “Dumb sonuvabitch” *louder voice wobble*

*Bobby hauls them off to deal with Leviathan and get to the new plot*

-

I’m glad they never had Carwash Party Leviathans.

-

*skip skip skip* I really love the leviathans. This little girl watching Dr Sexy!

I feel like that’s another loop around things that happens in this show… She’s listening to Biggersons adverts, as well, and then the callback to Dr Sexy…I mean we’re getting a Biggersons billboard in 13x03 if set spoilers are to be trusted that it will make it into the finished product… and omg DR SEXY. Are you a rom com chick, Dean? It’s a little bit tenuous but hey this keeps the memory of Dr Sexy alive, and then if Yockey watched all the Jody episodes just like I am doing to write 12x06 and deliberately referenced “strictly into dick” then maybe he caught this little thing about Dr Sexy and remembered that Dean likes soap operas too. Aside from the obvious chat about chick flicks from 11x23, it’s one of the few things aside from random little pop culture references that confirm he’s into feminine-coded television and actually, genuinely, 100% straight faced (bad term) watches it, while developing massive crushes on the male leads and imagining himself getting all pinned in an elevator getting made out with by them :P Anyway it stands as a huge point of data to suggest Dean genuinely would enjoy rom coms as we crawl through the slow slow deconstruction of Dean.

-

JODY

Bechdel test past finally for a Wayward Sister character, only 7 seasons into their sporadic appearances :P The nice older woman telling her horror stories about surgery… You can’t trust the doctors! (because they’re going to eat you)

Jody’s adorable face watching this story and too hopped up on painkillers to even care.

And then Dr Sexy walks in and they’re all smiles

Awwwww

“He might not know your appendix from your vagina” is one of the most hilariously horrifying Edlund lines out there.

I mean the old lady isn’t wrong, the doctors are steadily being overtaken by monsters… but she IS wrong that they’re waaaay cleverer than we’d give them credit for. Dr Sexy does all the terrifying surgery he likes with his medical know-how he borrowed from his vessel, and he’s the one who started in the little girl who didn’t know anything and had the warped view of the world of a kid who believes Dr Sexy, because clearly in many ways they could only learn about the world as much as their vessels knew, and if her perception would be that Dr Sexy is 100% fact, like Jesse the Antichrist believing everything he’s heard, the Leviathan has no frame of reference to think it isn’t.

-

Jody wakes up in time to know Shit Is Whack, and even completely drugged up takes the initiative to investigate Dr Sexy scarily abducting a patient.

I love her. Cop instincts, yes, but I think she’s already completely on board with things being not as they seem. If she thought it was just run of the mill crime she’d never have got out the bed, and just pushed the red button to get the authorities to handle it.

-

This is pt. 1 of way too many of them making us think Jody is going to get killed. 8x23 doesn’t even check back in with her so we have no clue how she’s doing until 9x08, which is the worst crime of all this, but then 9x08 also gets Jody horribly stabbed and leaves us with that for a couple of minutes so I’m not sure anyone’s without blame :P

I’m so glad she escaped the zone of Character We Know You All Love That We Bring Back Just To Threaten To Make You More Invested

I mean it totally works. It’s probably been a “Don’t kill Jody!” response that got so finely trained in us by their choices to bring her back as the local useful friendly sheriff character and then threatening her, that made us SO attached that it’s now inconcievable to kill her off and she has her own show instead…

But dang even 12x22 was messing with us and I think they had already spoiled there was a spin off about her at that point :P

-

Honestly Hannibal has nothing on the jokes the Leviathan make about eating people to seemingly oblivious victims/Jody who knows full well what they’re after.

-

“You can kiss my ass, Dr Monsterface”

WHY IS THIS NOT ON ALL THE SPN MERCH.

-

“Bobby Singer? My surgeon is a monster. He took my windbag roomie and *ate* her liver.”

Drugged up Jody is so precious. Why don’t we get her acting this adorable in the like SIX episodes in later seasons where she’s had to have a ton of emergency patching up for broken legs and stab wounds and stuff?

I’d love adorable painkiller high Jody to wish them on their way at the end of each episode… I suppose it doesn’t fit the tone of 9x19 but it would have been awesome in 11x12 :P

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“You and I killed zombies that time, I *know* you handle this sort of thing” - I suppose in 6x04 they were speaking heavily in code the entire time about what Jody did and didn’t know, and it was a silent agreement between them… The whole chat about where Bobby was stashing bodies on his property was an entire level of trust above this so I have to assume while she’s all drugged up she’s just spilling words in the sense that she doesn’t have the time or mental wherewithal to do the tacit chat about it.

Again it’s another step pulling her into the game. We can assume she’s been tootling around doing her job for the last few years and not getting involved and just giving Bobby massive leeway, but being attacked by monsters once again is yet another wake up - this time one she never comes back from :D

Having Bobby have to rescue her is a bit annoying but in a way I was thinking they could have just day in the life’d Jody but thrown in a leviathan attack at the police station or something, if they didn’t really need Sam n Dean in hospital at the end of this episode/start of the next to allow Dean to chillax while Jensen was busy directing. (I mean they could have done it as Weekend At Jody’s for 7x03 but oh well :P No need to wish to see what she does when the boys aren’t around if she gets a SPIN OFF) - anyway this way it’s nothing like Bobby swooping in and doing her job for her and you can take it implicitly that Jody would have handled shit if she hadn’t been drugged up and with a healing surgical wound.

She has a very mom role in Robbie’s 2 episodes with her this season where she doesn’t get involved in the monster fighting and it takes until 9x08 for her to have her first real *fight* since the zombie killing, and she called them in because it wasn’t her area… By 9x19 she’s handling shit herself much better and is prepared, machete-wise, for anything :P

-

Okay, Edlund is just the monster at understated nonsense lines, but this also has to be a favourite:

BOBBY  
Well, either Sheriff Mills is having an ObamaCare-insured opium dream, or something’s eating folks down at Sioux Falls General Hospital.

-

Anyway Bobby saves Jody and they’re adorable together. He’s on a tight schedule and she’s still high, but he loads her into a taxi to survive another day, and importantly she will be back soon rather than, like, next season, so it’s cool to let her go home to sleep off the surgery and monsters :P

BOBBY  
I’ll check it out. Now you get some rest. I’ll come by later.

JODY MILLS  
Bobby Singer. My hero.

BOBBY  
That’s the roofies talking.

Ahh man, the things that never were…

I suppose with this season they thought they’d bring her back and trial her as a returning character, then for some reason or another Carver was like eh not so impressed by how that all worked, let’s not bother with her for a bit… Ugh :P Past!Me was delighted to have all the Jody episodes in season 7 and then completely confused when in season 8 she showed up for 5 minutes for shitty reasons and it was like… that’s it?? That’s what was missing??

I’m so glad she goes back to being a fixture or at least with a proper episode about her in all the following seasons.

I am so so so pumped to watch 13x03 but now I have to go.


	6. 7x06: IN WHICH JODY AUSPICIOUSLY MAKES A GUY A SANDWICH AND DOES SOME HOUSEHOLD CHORES

Oh no, Robbie.

-

This face *gestures self* is the face of a person who’s made it a little way into the episode and knows this entire project is about the Wayward characters, has to keep mocking themselves for writing about The Man Pain™, and that they’ve done an entire OTT meta rewatch of the show, and still wants to delightedly write about things happening on the screen.

I hate Robbie so much.

It’s not my fault it takes so long for Jody to show up.

-

This is also one of the comparatively worst early season seven mourning!Dean episodes because it’s got the classic over-stuffed Robbie episode thing going on, so aside from “All Out Of Love” there’s really not that much for me to latch onto to talk back up to season 13… I really would just be analysing this episode for the millionth time.

-

wheee 14 minutes in and the main character shows up.

Incidentally Rufus’s cabin is better stocked with condiments and jars in one cupboard than the Bunker is in general which makes me depressed. Someone out to take them shopping.

Like Jody, who shows up unprompted at a cabin in the wilderness with a bag of groceries.

But yeah, this is the “immediate” follow on from 7x02, aka she probably should have been in 7x03 but Dabbflin didn’t have time for her if this is the sell, so we’re going to have to assume really what happened is that Bobby loaded her into a taxi, she spent a little while sleeping it off, and then came to to find that Singer Salvage had burned down and was like what the FUCK I take one medical leave and - UGH

And she finds out Sam n Dean survived but there’s no reports that Bobby is alive - although they were mysteriously discharged and an ambulance was stolen and she’s like, you know what, I bet I know who was responsible for that… And sure enough the CCTV footage shows Bobby stealing it, and then she does that Face and sits back in her chair

But then a couple of weeks later she’s like… he hasn’t even PHONED to let me know he’s ALIVE when his HOUSE burned down, are you KIDDING ME, BOBBY SINGER? and then went back to the drawing board, tracked him to Montana, and rage-drove 99% of the way there before she calmed down and he opened the door and she was just glad to see him.

Okay, filled the gap.

Anyway, 7x02 basically was bringing her back to use as local set dressing and a useful character to flesh out a little since she was already there… 7x06 starts making promises that she’s a part of their lives now. In a sense she is still being brought back entirely for Bobby - she’s been cameos or helping them or both in all of her appearances, and in this case it’s basically to connect with Bobby, and show her investment in their lives now she’s starting to get the hang of what they do, so that she can be later brought back for any MotW they feel like using her for (although the issue of her living in Sioux Falls and them literally just chasing them out of it like rats isn’t strictly addressed and also this was the Worst Timing for them to decide to be more Pro Jody but since she escaped the season unscathed she was deemed a nice returning character but not important enough to kill off). I don’t think there’s any suggestion she’d have been slated to be killed off at any point in season 7 - In 9x19 there was the threat she would die but it got rewritten, and she was definitely safe in all the episodes before that, if only because 9x08 wasn’t the right place to do it (plot wise) and Gadreel probably would have just brought her back… Kinda ironic that Bobo would have been the one to kill her and now he’s doing Wayward Sisters :P But, yeah, in the Robbie episodes he’s just enjoying having her around as an additional character to the dynamic because he loves fan favourites and if there aren’t enough fan favourites around he’ll MAKE a fan favourite.

I think the fact Jody fits so inconveniently into season 7’s theme of killing off everyone they love actually does speak for her having her own arc and own direction. And after this episode where she theoretically has her own motivations and agency, she is only really written just for Bobby, as a love interest and to move the plot along for him - in the next episode she gets to genuinely insert herself into their lives, clearly choose to help on a hunt, to bring them a case, and to start making the choice to get involved. Which begins the pattern of her as a completely independent character.

(8x23 notwithstanding and also was Kim just busy that year? I’m still not over it >.>)

Anyway. I see this episode as a final set up for that, I guess? It’s been a couple of years and she’s not yet become a hunter in the sense of being on a case, and we’ve seen her away from the job twice, fleshing out her personality and relationship with Bobby. Of course losing her son again was what taught her about the supernatural and clued her into what Bobby did, but I think losing Bobby is her angsty backstory in some ways. In this episode she basically just comes to check on him, showing she does have a drive 1000s of miles motiv- wait the heck up, 9x06 parallel also go AWAY The Man Pain™

-

Showing the difference to last year as well - this time Bobby tells her outright what the deal is with what he’s got downstairs. Last time in 6x04 he pulled favours with her but didn’t explain the actual reasons why, or even tell her why he had a body in his basement. This time she’s in on the active situation (also - one of the only years she actually knows what the main plot is. I hope they told her off-screen in 8x23 though.) and it’s a step up from when they had an understanding about his job but he didn’t elaborate and Jody didn’t ask questions.

-

I actually quite like on a character level Jody offering to be so domestic for Bobby… I mean if only for his wtf someone being nice to me and thanking me face and his reaction to Jody telling him to call her Jody :P He even grumbles that no one pays him for the job but right when she is actually offering him repayment already and brought beer and thanks. Jody’s kind of been a damsel in distress followed by a love interest/let me cook and clean for you character, but she has pre-established badassery AND domestic qualities. She’s actually softening back up from 6x04, while 5x15 showed her uncomfortably vulnerable and a whole part of her grieving process was getting back into work etc. (That appendectomy was the best thing that ever happened to her.) And of course being motherly is her no.1 trait, and it’s not a bad thing to be a motherly character as long as you’re not utterly reduced to it. And on this show which has utterly reduced Mary to a motherly archetype? Jody even being *alive* while having Motherly as a primary character trait is impressive. And to be a motherly influence to the guys or to be a love interest to Bobby. She is still allowed to stand utterly on her own, and THEN she starts adopting a whole bunch of girls, when she’s already a complicated, nuanced character, who’s affected by but not boxed in by having once been a mother and still displaying maternal or feminine traits. And like I said somewhere earlier in this, she doesn’t even get into the fight in a hunt until 9x08 again after 5x15. She’s sort of in a way been almost too good for this show all along, before she ended up connected to the attempt to spin off a better representation, female-led show.

-

on a meta level it sort of sucks that she gets rescued, starts crushing on Bobby, Bobby crushes on her, and then she solves their monster problem by doing household chores and that’s her entire role for 2 whole episodes of Jody.

-

“I had a brother with this many issues once. You know what I did? I ate him.”

-

Or this scene where Jody pretty much entirely exists in the background of Bobby, making him a sandwich and her speaking makes them start teasing Bobby about him having a girl over

-

Like, sure, character building, great to see Jody out and about and in the plaid of family (and she was rocking a leather jacket in the previous scene) but uughhh Robbie, thanks for following up with 7x12 because based on this episode alone you reeeeally could have gone one of two ways

-

Meanwhile: entire scenes with Bobby where Jody isn’t even in the room

-

The exterior shots of the cabin reveal it has a back porch, which makes it the most under utilised fan fic thing EVER in my experience (I haven’t even read something SET here, and I mean FAIR ENOUGH Dean n Cas are only in here together like 3 times tops and 2 of those are in season 7 and then they get the Bunker) but it has an epic view and looks a really chill place to hang out. I feel like I need to make a retro season 8 Destiel fic just to take advantage. Or send Dean n Cas on a honeymoon here.

Like why would they go to a random cabin in the woods like a bunch of fics do when this one is warded?

-

dangit. This is what happens when you don’t put Jody on screen enough, ROBBIE.

-

Like 5 minutes of Jim Beaver acting opposite of Jim Beaver later, ignoring the excellent chemistry upstairs, FINALLY she solves the thing for him by being CLUMSY and domestic.

She’s just so narratively PASSIVE. Bobby even sweeps in and kisses her, and she just stands there shocked. Like, he probably was reading all the signals right that saving her life really was a turn on (or why would she show up with a 6 pack of beer, her hottest jacket, and offer to do all this :P)

-

Was Kim only on set 1 day, because Bobby’s talking about the Borax downstairs away from Jody again as well. ASFGFHJK this is probably why you’re supposed to watch the entire episode of a thing at once. Is this how people end up bitter Cas fans or whatever, only watching his bits out of context to all the other stuff going on? Like obviously we’re just dropping by on Jody here and it serves a much much better wider narrative purpose - to boost her into the show as a VIABLE repeat character especially now they’ve abandoned Sioux Falls so for Jody it’s a metaphorical “pack your bags and move away” from being just someone local to Bobby… I mean ironically by going nowhere, but projecting herself into their story. Even in 7x12 she’s just “the local sheriff from Sioux Falls they had the one zombie thing with” despite it being her 4th episode it COULD be as random as one of MANY other cops the Winchesters have worked with coming back into their lives - like bumping into Donna again :P - but Jody’s banked 3 episodes in Bobby’s sphere only, so that after losing the geographical location, and then Bobby himself, when she calls up the Winchesters we have a great sense of her as a person, of the dynamic she could lend them, and it’s time for her to branch out into being one of their contacts now.

But idk obviously you have to take this episode both with her entire history in mind, that Robbie isn’t a douche, AND that it’s the final bit of set up for things to come - that she’s crammed into a busy episode to do the final step of bonding with Bobby and all and fitted into the gaps - so that we can have so much more of her… It reads SO weirdly to skip just to her parts.

-

Unrelated thought: Robbie put in an ENORMOUS fan fic gap. She also mysteriously ditches her leather jacket and puts on a different canvas one. The leather jackets are often for sexy femme fatale characters (Megs and Rubys for example having the most number of them :P Billie and Tessa also are obstacles or unhelpful and sometimes wear one to having it as part of their signature look… I’m missing others because this is like the Sexy Leather Jacket show for female characters and Dean in 7x22/23/Purgatory), while the canvas one makes her much more friend and family.

-

Also:

“Anytime you need me to spill something else, you give me a call.”

I love Jody an extraordinary amount, and now I’m not worried about seeing them kill her off on this show, I can let that flag fly :P

-

And Bobby just gives her a severed head in a box.

Well… she did know what she was getting into with him, a bit.

She smiles fondly anyway, and laughs. And he gives her a kiss of more to come.

-

… Not looking forward to immediately skipping to Bobby being dead especially when I’m filtering this all through Jody’s feelings and budding romance with him being cut short. But I should not watch that one late at night because I wanna watch the whole thing.


	7. 7x12: IN WHICH LIZZY GIVES IN TO THE SEASON 13 MAN PAIN™ BUT JODY GIVES IN TO BEING A HUNTER

So I threatened to watch the whole thing and sue me, I’m interested in The Man Pain™ in this episode because THIS, now, unlike 7x06 which had no time to develop the grieving Dean I wanted… THIS episode has ALL the time.

(PS: that was a pun, no it doesn’t, if you don’t own the DVDs maybe I should do a play by play of the last scene in a separate post for all the people who haven’t seen it :P Dammit Robbie and your over-stuffed episodes!!)

However, this episode has aaall the character development that the previous one lacked for fast pace and shorthands.

And Jody finally, FINALLY steps up and joins in a hunt with Sam, simultaneously starting their ship properly and beginning the bonding process properly after 3 episodes with no contact with the Winchesters (the killing the zombie son trauma is their shared moment that bonds her and Sam - and I think Jody has been tapping her wrist staring at Dean waiting for him to open up and spill about his woes for 5 years now, because I seriously don’t think that, fan fic gaps for our pleasure aside, he ACTUALLY opened up to her in 13x03 if only because he would be more unburdened and better balanced… Jody is a nurturer who adopts the smol ones. DEAN is a nurturer who adopts the smol ones. It was an episode ABOUT Jody nurturing and adopting another smol one. And Dean is fighting doing so with every grief-wracked fibre of his being. He isn’t ready to talk to Jody. Because that would be the Entire Unburdening Of Dean Winchester, and will probably never happen on our screens all in one go. A post-endgame thought.

But anyway enough for now of the season 13 The Man Pain™ because if I had to pick one episode to rub all over 13x03 and create a time loop between the two mirroring past and present… I am not done by far)

-

(Robbie Foreshadowing™ is the most powerful force on this show and he proved it WITH this episode IN 11x16, and I have never doubted since the weird things that have continued to happen since his departure that were Peak Robbie Foreshadowing Things He Could Not Possibly Have Known About But Here We Are. And yep it could well be that other writers are using his shit but this is Robbie. It’s all deliberate foreshadowing and will be until the end of the show and probably on to freaking Wayward Sisters.)

-

Jody in the recap like hi I kill zombies - introduced in connection to Bobby because we’re mourning him and she’s mourning him and she’s popping up as I swear to god a Dean/Cas parallel to Bobby and have we talked about that before because we go over so much ground so many times and you lose sense of who you are as a person

-

I am personally offended I have to watch Bobby die in a recap this early in the morning

-

Robbie Foreshadowing™ no. 1 - the parallel to 8x12 (I mean, Time after Time and As Times Goes By - does anyone ever remember which is which by the title?) and Chronos looking like Henry Winchester superficially in another episode about time jumping, where they are both “family men” who ditch their families in time. Chronos is the villain so it’s much much worse (the historical Chronos was an awful father who kept eating all his children and I’m pretty sure the batch of the rest of the pantheon of common Greek gods like Zeus and Poseidon and Hades only survived because of some trickery with making him eat rocks or something, or Marcia Williams has failed me).

-

Ah and step 1 of the incredible “Strictly Into Dick” 3 step plan. Which foreshadows Yockey picking up this thread and tying it into a bow around “no chick flick moments” because the pupil has become the master blah blah.

I should mention there’s some extra reading here of definitely the first post and maybe the second if you’re up for 2 of my rewatch notes in a go…  
<https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/153352165213/honestly-after-reading-thevioletcaptain-pointing>  
<https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/141674273508/7x12-rewatch-or-welcome-to-the-latest-instalment>   
Although I’ll probably repeat some of this sentiment, hopefully in a less feverish way…

-

This is Dean deep down in the depths of loss, staying up all night… But he has something to swing at. Dick Roman is the face of the thing that killed Cas and killed Bobby, and unlike Jack it’s open season on him and Dean can lean down into the car in the recap of 7x10 and promise Dick that he will find a way to kill him and end him. It’s nowhere near as muddy as what he told Jack - the only hindrance is finding something that will kill their latest invulnerable foe. Jack, however, only superficially resembles this and I think part of the problem is Sam takes it like Dean has sworn a Dick Roman vendetta against Jack.

Dean in the present is empty and if he has nothing else to do, will sit in his room and drink and stare at the wall.

He’s not researching how to kill Jack. He hasn’t applied himself to anything. The anime in this season was his despair phase and this was his targeted rage… In season 13 his despair phase is empty and there’s nothing for him to rage AT except for Jack, who he can’t treat like Dick.

-

Despite Dean being awake and it would make more sense to show him fielding the call on a general helpline Winchester phone, Jody calls Sam personally and Sam is woken up by it - showing that she is linked more to Sam immediately when she picks a Winchester to call, and the staging on this side shows that Dean is being left out of that - that he’s watching over his laptop rather than being drawn in.

Last episode to this Sam was talking about calling up Bobby’s people and letting them know he was dead - Dean resisted and Sam probably ended up doing it anyway after the rest of the episode unfolded and they managed to shake off the immediate 3 week funk after his death and with a nice save under their belts OF some of Bobby’s peeps, they might have been able to face his address book.

If Sam didn’t call Jody up and commiserate with her about Bobby once already…

-

Also considering I had to skip 14 minutes of episode it’s so nice to have her here so soon that her credit appears on top of her on screen.

-

Her matter-of-fact chatting about it being mummified is the new tone for Jody - the weird stuff happens all around them and now she knows and is prepared to listen to the thought in the back of her head that it’s not normal… And now she has someone to go to to share these things. Since Bobby is dead.

She blows off Sam’s curiosity about why she even found the case in the first place as curiosity before displaying the super important Jody trait of actually opening up and talking about how she feels -

“I’m just that nosy. Look, after everything I’ve been through with you boys and… with Bobby, you know, something like this pops up on the wire, it catches my ear. What can I say?”

She tries to play it off as being through “everything” with them, but remember she only did 5x15 with them, and while that was memorable enough for her, she is still a 1 episode friend to them, and a 4 episode friend for Bobby. Her voice breaks as she says his name, because she can confront her grief. She knew what they had and what they DIDN’T have and she is practised at grief (having had to lose her son TWICE and her husband).

I wish she HAD talked to Dean in the car in 13x03 but…

-

That line also is the meta hook into her chance to be a returning character (hence: rage that I have to skip basically to season NINE to see her in her proper capacity as a friend and all).

-

“That was Sheriff Mills. She caught us one.”

“Oh, I feel bad. We didn’t get her anything.”

I love it.

but his snark rather than a !! yay jody !! reaction puts Sam at unease, and he looks more critically at Dean being awake in the night on his laptop, and comes up with the thing he said instead of when the “strictly into Dick” line was the instant snappy response (HE JUST WOKE UP, I TEASE BUT I DON’T JUDGE)

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this but I hope you’re watching cartoon smut, ‘cause reading Dick Roman crap over and over again is just self-punishment.”

“It’s called anime, and it’s an art form.”

He brings up the anime as a joke because examining the context - that Dean was mourning Cas and his betrayal and waiting for the world to end in a fury - is actually not really ANY better than rage-researching Dick, and in fact probably more healthy in the long run to have a target and some reason to keep going. Their family copes with everything BY revenge - see also, all their backstory up to the end of season 2.

However given the rest of the episode we should probably sort it into “despair = anime” and “revenge = dick” and Dean is struggling to stay afloat with Dick and the undercurrent of his mood is actually anime, as he’ll eventually reveal… In the mean time, Sam is ignoring context and hoping the anime is at least fun and mood alleviating for Dean rather than his nihilistic response to Cas’s death (sound familiar?) and theoretically healthier for him emotionally than hyper-focusing on the revenge.

There’s been a lot of discussion about Sam not understanding or mis-reading Dean’ grief and rage, especially to do with Cas. In 7x09 Dean had the honesty moment because of the sandwich which should have laid out that Cas was still a large factor to his sadness, and I don’t think Sam necessarily doesn’t REALISE it here, especially as this is the 1000% less-charged version to season 13 where it’s main plot. But there’s still a sense that though the Bobby grief is rawer and nearer and represents a terrible blow to them, the Cas thing is a sort of next level amount of awful, the inciting grief of the season, and the issue that affects Dean the longest, as of course even by 1 scene he lets go of Bobby first and THEN manages to reconcile with Cas. It doesn’t help Bobby’s death is a knock-on effect of Cas’s actions, but it can be filed under something awful Dick did, and part of the reconciliation with Cas is seeing him at Bobby’s send off, and having Bobby move from active grief to something they’ve managed to actually complete the stages of mourning over. Which if this was a real season 7 rewatch I’d at least try not to explain all the way down in episode 12. Anyway Sam not dealing the same way as Dean is laid out clearly in 7x01 when he forgives Cas and asks him to come back and Cas does, while Dean is still deep in the anime and drinking and total despair.

-

Blah blah 11x16 house montage. Layers in layers but not our layers except for the visual demonstration of the house in 2 sides of time, the episode in 2 sides of the show, and now this scenario of lost Cas lost parental figure, nihilistic mourning Dean, all sandwiched up and down on top of each other in an episode which is going to separate Sam and Dean, backwards upside down to Sam giving Jody the case and then Dean leaving to help her with it, instead of Jody coming here…

-

If you need me I will be weeping about how poorly timed “strictly into dick” was. Sam wanted to get that barb in and he would die trying. They’re just working the case! Dean isn’t in his rage revenge mode!!

I think Sam is trying to break the tension by throwing barbs at Dean, but again it’s just aaall the deeper implications that Sam is harping on the anime thing. He’s so fucking proud of himself for putting the most epic Dick joke of the season together and he fucked it up on like every single level.

No wonder Dean looks at him like that.

I mean I LOVE Sam’s smug smug face, but he is just so far off the mark here. And yet it is also a commentary on how Dean’s covering up the nihilism (anime) with a purpose (hunting Dick). And with season 13 to compare back to it I think we have more language now to understand Dean’s grief even before 13x04 which I suppose we’re all just assuming, being Glynn, is going to drop some epic truth bombs since she and Yockey were literally competing to destroy Dean’s facade fastest in their episodes at the start of season 12.

(I’m sorry, but Yockey won that round so so hard.)

-

“Are those local feeds?”

“Yeah.”

“How did you do that so fast?”

“A little tutorial from Frank. Don’t worry. We’ll pretend this never happened.”

Dean wins this round too - Sam is teasing him about his inaction or obsession making him a bad hunter - in the subtext and probably not intentionally, he’s just joking about what he’s seen Dean use a computer for lately and is missing meta writer nuance - and Dean goes and in a couple of seconds he’s got them something really useful for the case. Dean’s inaction or obsession aren’t hindering him. He’s tamped down one with the other and like Frank advised last episode, he’s going through the motions and getting things done.

I’ll get to the point later but it’s important that in season 7 Dean’s actions are paralleled with Sam’s in suppressing Hallucifer - magic vs emotional plotlines as always. Dean can function as well as Sam to do MotW and even something like Plucky’s where it’s all fun and games and gets to tease Sam in turn. He’s “functioning” and even in a way this would help him to get over the grief in the long run, albeit to be hardened by it. 7x11-16 are the episodes which explore how they would be when *truly* alone… And in this time Jody and Garth are their ONLY back up - new or at least… Garth… hunters who they are fond of but don’t fit into their hardened grief family very well. Not in the way Cas or Bobby did.

-

Anyway then Dean gets separated from Sam so that Jody can get involved as back up because she generally is there to play back up for one of them to bounce off of while they take different storylines.

-

Aaand here comes Ness, with his Cas-like intro, walking in all dramatically in a long coat and his image concealed behind a CAGED HALO LIGHT… Basically I probably rambled more in my original notes but this is enough to go on that Dean’s gonna spend the rest of this episode with a Cas mirror who reminds him of Cas.

-

“What happened in the alley? And paint me a real picture.”

“All right, well, I’m "twelve monkeyed” no matter what I say, so here goes. I was chasing this dude. Uh, I’d just seen him mummify a guy. Yeah. So, I jumped him. He lights up red. Poof, we’re in 1944.“

Dean forced to tell absolute honesty about the case, and in revealing he’s a hunter gets the cooperation of the local law enforcement.

Again it’s a step away from season 13 but it shows his process for revealing he has nothing to lose because the entire thing is ridiculous and so the truth may as well come out because at this point WHY NOT. The nihilism bubbling under the surface, and this is sort of a meta key to it, because Dean is still pasting on a game face and focusing on revenge…

-

This is gonna be so funny to revisit after Dean gets a cowboy kick in 13x06, since it’s another fangirl moment right in the middle of his loss. 5x08 is starting to be the outlier that proves the rule with all the others dragging him out of bad places - Tara back in season 2 when he needed the kick to get back into the job, Gunnar with his "Keep on grinding” message, Ness and his place in the dubious words of advice in season 7 to complete the set of advice Dean gets in short succession this year… And 13x06 being the episode that he gets Cas back AND a massive fangirl kick? I’m already compiling compare and contrast moments in my head.

And Dr Sexy is linked to his Cas grief through 7x02, although they never directly interact. He is the scientist on the Biggersons thing and eventually is forced to Bib himself right before Dick takes over Dean’s thoughts for revenge…

I mean in the context of season 7 still probably thinking Cas wasn’t coming back at the time of writing, perhaps, it’s a symbolic sort of moving on to put Bobby grief on top of the Cas one and just have it as a thing in Dean’s past. But even ignoring the fan kickback and saying it’s for the story… Dean NEEDS to address the things that hurt him and to deal with his grief properly, and Cas was always going to be an open festering wound. And even though Dean’s on the Dick revenge mission for Bobby, this Cas mirror guy showing up to unsettle Dean… well.

-

ANYWAY JODY!!! Sam is working the case on his own, far side of the room. Jody calls on a phone in the foreground and he rushes over to it. Beautiful. :’)

I mean they literally just shoved her at Bobby, they’re much more shippable in season 9 because I get to use that gif of Dean from 12x12 again for a certain line in 9x08 :P She’s also accidentally been shoved at Crowley in that mean time and though there’s a symbolic generational gap that isn’t actually true to their ages, Crowley and Dean have a thing in season 9 aaand this is the start of Sam and Jody as friendly PEERS.

I want them to get married so badly you have no idea. Sam doesn’t even need to be in Wayward Sisters, Jody can just always refer to him being out on a case but make some innuendo about when he comes home and I’ll be happy. Literally everyone will understand Sam married to Jody but he’s never home or they see each other off-screen :P

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“The thing that’s been mummifying people took him in a frigging ball of light and disappeared.”

“You guys get that a lot?”

“Yeah, more than most people.”

She’s just like “yep I am going to accept any and all weirdness that comes our way. These guys are the experts but I saw Dr Monsterface doing his thing so I am just going to take his word 100% about anything else.

I love that her first instinct is to help. I think her saying she got him into it is only half the reason - sure she has some sense of responsibility but the fact she’s been curiously keeping an eye out for cases… She wants something to fill that void the same as the other mourners in the episode. She turned to work after her son and husband died, but now she knows better just how bad the world is with monsters, she’s going to do anything she can to make it better off the clock.

-

Sam eases her in with a research trip to raid one of Bobby’s stashes of old papers.

Incidentally, still pissed they never stocked the Bunker with the Campbell Family Library or Bobby’s hoarder stuff - they should at least reference that they significantly increased its collection by consolidating the 2 other biggest lore treasure troves in the country. I hope they at least moved all their extra books to storage lockers somewhere. We probably don’t see them between episodes and whole years pass between 23 drop in moments because they’re so busy ARCHIVING and doing paperwork.

-

TEEHEE Dean and the solider.

-

JODY IS BACK IN THE SEXY JACKET FOR SAM

maybe I was wrong

she is doing basically the same thing for Sam as she did for Bobby - but instead of wooing him with beer and sandwiches, she’s bringing him all the boxes of obscure lore he could wish for! (And one of them possibly has something alive in it :P)

I love how calm she is about all this. I think the more logical explanation than furiously shipping her with Sam is all about her arc of coming to be a hunter, and how the whole deal is she’s so amazingly calm and prepared for this and ready for anything, and she’s decided that this is her jurisdiction, and now Sam is the most competent hunter she knows to teach her. But she won’t ask to be taught - and her cop skills give her a huge edge that she doesn’t need a training montage - she just needs to know how to deal with unusual perps and mysterious crimes that common mundane knowledge can’t handle, and what she needs to be prepared for to defend her town from ever having a thing like the zombies again.

well, uh, the Wayward Sisters premise is a hellmouth presumably ON Sioux Falls and I will DIE if they reuse the Singer Salvage Yard set for it in a kind of LOL the Patriarchy Of The Old Ways is now a hellmouth the girls must defeat. And over on the dude show SamnDean can have their mainpain about Bobby :P

And Jody will be able to put her skills to the test and her leadership and mothering role - which is one and the same in a brilliant way…

Gah.

-

Dean gets all dressed up and admired by a dude and a lady at the same time.

-

Also, Ezra says "idjits” which obviously links her to Bobby, so Dean’s in a room with the 2 people he’s mourning - Cas and Bobby. But they’re swapped around in some ways. Ezra kisses him while Elliot delivers the last part of the Bobby-themed grim advice for Dean. Their emotional support for Dean is swapped.

…

Dean wants to smootch Cas is what I’m saying

-

Jody uses a real federal police database. I am not entirely sure Sam hasn’t stolen her login to continue using it all the other times we see him hacking things :P

(Well, no, he’s been doing it for years - Jody just ends an air of legitimacy to their hunt)

-

Sam and Dean get two separate info dumps, but they don’t have all the same info and they have different - complimentary - approaches. It’s a great Sam n Dean as opposites that make a complete whole episode, which is a strong theme Robbie pushed. In this case either side of a time travel drama.

-

It’s small things like Sam getting the bad news for saving Dean and Jody getting the good news - she’s new at this and beginner’s luck - her research has paid off twice now, that she’s found something helpful in Bobby’s stuff. It puts her in the lead, as it were, in the Sam, Dean, Jody race to win this situation.

I love that she does so well on her first hunt, but then, even though she stays firmly on the paperwork and investigative side of things, she is being trialled for them. Donna has the same thing - in 11x07 she actually isn’t involved in the main confrontation at all, but it’s the third time they’ve encountered her, this time she has their number, called them in, knows the deal, and assists them on the hunt in an official capacity. Same process as Jody but she’s way more integrated into their emotional arcs.

This episode is essentially how team building exercises work but with a real life crisis situation. Considering Jody spends all this time with Sam and hasn’t actually spoken directly to Dean yet, and barely had anything to do with him in 5x15 except hostile interactions in the start, and a sort of apologetic now we’re eye-to-eye at the end… Yeah. Sam has an enormous emotional advantage with her because of how Dean is kept out of her way a little.

More news at 10 on that one as I work my way through.

-

“Or we get an angry god, but no big brother” Sam is a person to her, Dean is an object that belongs to Sam as the abstract concept of a big brother worth saving.

-

It’s the bottle! Robbie Foreshadowing™

-

GRIEF TIME.

-

Sam really feels it, of course he does, and he feels for Jody. And her being able to express her emotions and talk about it and voice some of how she’s feeling -

“It’s weird, huh? It’s like their life’s a big puzzle. You just keep finding pieces of it scattered all over the place.”

She barely knew Bobby and she’s new to the life and she’s piecing it all together for herself.

Sam hasn’t confronted his grief, really - as usual he bottles things up. In 7x11 he had the healthier approach to just being in mourning and knowing it was a state they had to deal with and things they had to do to move on while Dean was in denial somewhat about things like having to call Bobby’s people (aka Jody). Sam has reached out to her, earned and ally, and her voicing things about grief is helping him to feel his own things about Bobby. Again it’s connected through alcohol, but in this  moment the bottle is a final moment - and later we’ll know the end to a story as well - and absolutely drinking it is the best possible thing to do because even though Bobby’s history is attached to it, it can be drunk, and then be gone, and Bobby would have been so happy it was Jody and Sam in particular drinking to his and Rufus’s memory. It’s a coping and functioning again when the hangover clears thing. Pouring one out etc.

Meanwhile Dean has just re-pocketed Bobby’s flask, that Bobby himself is tied to, and that as long as Dean is drinking from it he CAN’T let Bobby’s memory go, and he can refill and refill the flask to drink his grief. Burning it is the only way to remove it, while of course once the bottle of scotch is gone, it’s gone.

-

And now we go straight from Sam’s grieving scene using Jody, we have Dean’s grieving scene with Ness. Of course he starts it by having a flask.

Dean asks about death, and Ness calls him morbid - Dean can’t imagine you wouldn’t be a hunter without a tragic story. And Jody has become part of the life because of tragedy… But she’s moving into it because she’s positive. She wants to grow and help people, and there’s nothing to get revenge against…

…

except, woah, meta theory…

So Death Himself raised her son and got her husband killed?

And Jody is The Unkillable Side Character who has sealed a deal to not be killed on the show because Wayward Sisters?

Jody has got her revenge by defying Death Himself in the meta narrative.

I love her so much

-

Meanwhile Dean talks about the job again, and HERE is the nihilism from season 13 - the brief times it surfaces this season are basically just the anime porn, the sandwich thing, and with Bobby, Frank and now Ness, who all give him an equivalent of the boo hoo speech. Dean is not allowed his pain and his grief this season. Every time he starts to slide into nihilism too much happens to let him stay there and feel it all. It gets him through the season, but right through the middle part where he feels like giving up, he gets the kind of speeches which ONLY work to pull someone off the ledge, but not to help them back all the way to peace and healing. Frank’s method keeps you alive but kills you inside.

This speech also gets interrupted by the arrival of the person they’re waiting for, so Dean doesn’t get enough of a reaction to this depressed, dull approach to the job.

“Sometimes you just want to punch through the red tape with a silver bullet. Yeah, hunting sets me free. Isn’t that why you hunt?”  
“I used to do it 'cause that’s what my family did.”  
“Hmm.”  
“But they just seem to keep dying. To tell you the truth, I don’t know why I’m doing much of anything anymore.”  
“Boo-hoo. Cry me a river, ya nancy. Tell me, are all hunters as soft as you in the future? Everybody loses everybody. And then one day, boom. Your number’s up, but at least you’re making a difference. So enjoy it while it lasts, kid, 'cause hunting’s the only clarity you’re gonna find in this life. And that makes you luckier than most.”

It definitely parallels to the previous conversation, but again Sam has better peace of mind, a WEIRDLY zen headspace he’s earned from keeping Lucifer shut up the entire time because of the perspective it’s given him on life. I’d never say he’s exactly healthy in many respects because none of them are, but season 7 Sam’s zen is a sort of magical version of his character I love a lot. And he is clearly working through things - I think if Dean and Cas again hadn’t died at the end of the season he really would have been slowly putting himself back to normal, because after 7x17 he’s FREE.

-

Oh, the house they end up going to is the one from 2x03, 5x13, and 9x11 (I’ve spotted it a few other times but not so obviously)… Again, the nature of Dean as a hunter is being put in the spotlight with that last massively important conversation.

-

Ezra’s kiss is “lucky” and it’s sheer luck Dean made it back… Sheer luck Bobby manipulates to bring Cas back into Dean’s life woah I am deep in this conspiracy :D

-

I love the implication that off-screen Chronos was all ominous and “I’m going to take the trash out” when he went out to deal with Chronos bu his girlfriend ruins the whole mood by being like honeeeey you forgot the trash

-

Anyway it would be romantic if he was nice, but he yells at her, makes me wonder how good their relationship was BEFORE he got into trouble with hunters, and if he ever yelled at her before. She’s probably indirectly saved by them killing him >.>

-

I do think “do I have to use my mom voice” is one of those Robbie sentimental lines which is kind of misunderstood in fandom as Jody being too mom-ish to Sam that she’s entirely a maternal figure, when she’s almost always shown as an equal to him - again they have a much better connection going right back to her first episode - and she’s being kind of jokey about it here. She barely knows him and she’s goofing around with him which is a great sign that she’s doing better about her own grief about her son - and Sam is in no way like the kid she lot so recently that imagining a 6 foot dude is not the same as speculating that Alex is not much older than he would have been… I think Jody IS a maternal sort of figure to them, but this line really means as much as Dean teasing her in 9x08 or 9x19 that oooh she’s all grown up when she brings them a case. (I think 9x19 when she shows them the vampire in the trunk of her car :P)

But yeah, not the entirety of their relationship dynamic, ESPECIALLY Sam who has never known Mary and can form a less needy bond than Dean who is kept distant at first kind of accidentally, then I think deliberately, and has a standing invitation to open up he’s never accepted, not even when Mary was back. I think it’s important to understand how much Dean has NOT bonded with Jody. Not to say he doesn’t care for her - it’s just a reverse of the Dean n Cas and Sam over there dynamic.

-

Incidentally in a bizarre Robbie Foreshadowing™ twist, canonspngifs is posting tons of 11x16 on my dash, which is of course the mirror episode to this one.

-

It’s interesting how Lila has completely re-arranged her memory of what happened to Dean being strangled (to explain the magical elements of it?), OR because Dean hasn’t “come back to the future” yet the time travel can’t be factored into it, so everything goes the same except his time travel in her memory, and it only… belatedly… applies?

I have no clue how it works on this show and I hate it.

-

I am pretty sure Lila has Chronos’ son running around somewhere out there. She may have had a son or grandson she was talking about in the nursing home…

-

That would be a wild twist to bring back for Jack parallels and honestly fuck Robbie Foreshadowing™ if that happens.

-

I love how this episode just randomly becomes a horrible Destiel parallel about a cosmic creature who does whatever he likes and stopped for love… It also becomes a Cain and Colette parallel once you realise they’re both Robbie episodes and therefore Robbie Foreshadowing™ and that was a Destiel parallel but only filtered through them…

-

Sam gets the big kill, and he was also the one who summoned Chronos so he gets the prophecy - specifically for despite all his good progress with grief, the end of his season is going to SHATTER him, because black goo, because the title card is black good, and in an actual episode for the one season only we actually GET the title card as part of the action… when Cas and Dean are sucked to Purgatory.

-

Robbie Foreshadowing™

-

I need to load the deleted scene for the rest of this episode.

-

Oh I forget that Sam and Jody argue about the logic about the spell and how to get the ingredients for the spell, aka to explain how they managed to get all they needed.

-

JODY AND DEAN DIRECTLY INTERACT FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 5x15

  


Concern, slightly teasing. He grabs a beer from the cooler to put on his neck, because Winchester Medicine.

she hasn’t established a friendly rapport with Dean because they were antagonistic/grief-stricken the entire time they were interacting, TWO YEARS AGO. This is probably the final step to get her completely in the fold, that Dean now understands and respects her as an ally and hunter because he comes back to discover Jody knocked it out of the park helping Sam.

-

  
  


“So listen, don’t call us again. Unless you want to be chased by some crazy god or something.”

Samuel Winchester, was that a flirtation?

But yeah, expressly showing that the call to action is in Jody’s hands.

“Yeah, don’t worry, I won’t.”

AND SHE DIDN’T FOR A YEAR AND I AM SO ANGRY

-

  


She hugs Sam but walks off with no hug for Dean.

-

Sam waves after her because he is smitten.

-

Sam grins at Dean like WOW that was life affirming and great and I feel refreshed and happy and unburdened and there are rainbows and sunbeams and -

Dean is not impressed.

-

  


Sam compliments Dean’s handling of the case while Dean still hasn’t said anything since Sam started flirting w/ Jody.

Dean brushes it off like pfft you may have bonded with a hot unkillable lady but *I* was bonding with a hot historical dude…

  
  


Honestly him popping a beer is more like a reward since the flask thing is so horrible by now.

(I know wincest fans are pretty fond of this deleted scene because they think it’s flirty, but it’s a break in the tension from this season - Sam and Dean trying to find their way back to happy. 7x14 is the same thing on a grand scale, and just around the corner. This entire section is coping mechanisms city.)

-

  


Anyway, they laugh at each other a bit, and get back to plot, because Sam is bothered.

Dean tries denial for size

  


I don’t even know what this is that Sam says…

  
  


But then Dean calls Bobby “the old man” which is objectively the worst thing ever and I am so sad. Dean misses Bobby so much and I think this is a way of beginning to process the grief after all the crappy advice he got, it is helping a LITTLE, not to fix him, but  maybe so he can talk about it, even in these bleak terms:

  


Dean saying clarity about the hunting - once again after Bobby and Frank’s advice, he takes Ness’s too, to take hunting as his clarity.

TBH it’s probably a good thing he was punted straight into Purgatory because A: Robbie Foreshadowing™ on the themes of purity in hunting, and Dean would have massively self-destructed with no other goal when Dick was dead, even worse than Sam. Sam was the one who would have coped WELL.

-

  
  


Dean asks for more beer. OH DEAN. Nope he’s just settling in for the night.

-

Sam leaves and Dean strips down to his waistcoat, which you may have already seen gifs of and thought the deleted scene was a single moment of him doing this, if you have never seen wincest blogs reblogging the banter. You would be WRONG.

He CHECKS to make sure Sam isn’t still observing him and his grieving process of going after Dick and judging him some more…

And the episode ends on the super homoerotic “Dick erects a tower in manhattan” that Dean is reading (complete with upward rising graph), because this is the punchline to “are you going to watch more anime, or are you strictly into Dick?”


	8. 8x23 & 9x08 DEATH AND REBIRTH

There’s no point doing these separately and anyway they do kinda thematically tie together.

Jody’s back from whatever Kim was doing this year and though this moment is awful and makes her season 8 totally suck (and they don’t even MENTION her in this time even though she had been starting to build bonds with them at long last, having got her “in” with the Winchesters…) it’s actually a good re-intro scene for her, focusing on who she is/was as a character, especially in the truth/not truth talk to Crowley, where of course both of them are lying about knowing about the supernatural but only Crowley knows Jody’s in on it too. It makes her doubly emotionally vulnerable talking about herself, but she’s the best sympathy pull possible for this scene because there are lines and bringing back a beloved character like Jody - one of the only reoccurring characters since Kripke era who’s clung on *even by this point* (aside from Crowley and Cas, of course, who are outliers adn should not have been counted) - and threatening to kill her off… Yeah, it’s similar to Patience’s vision but wayyy less official. That was the “she can’t be killed off, she has a spin off, she’s invincible now” on-screen death. With this one, her almost-death gives her a strong character re-start and on her return to the story as a regular side character she falls into her role for seasons 9 to the start of 13, which is 4 solid years plus one or 2 episodes this year moving her past half her entire time on the show, where she’s a proper part of the show’s landscape again. Berens, of course, unintentionally saves Jody long term after the decision was made not to kill her off, and it’s fitting now he’s so involved in Wayward Sisters… but I’m getting ahead of myself :D

-

It is definitely cheating, btw, to listen to Carry on Wayward Son when you don’t mean to watch the episode :P

Season 8 is definitely a weird nostalgia season where it feels like Peak Show… Idk, it had some weird or bad moments but this recap feels like a whole collection of the most interesting characters/most important moments. Carver *definitely* saved the show with absolute style. I mean I like season 7, personally, but that’s an unusual position for apparently most people who’ve watched the show. The shift to fun action and character driven nonsense also, of course, is one of the reasons Jody’s position later is allowed to flourish. It’s *ridiculous* how much character exploration happens in these seasons compared to the entire run previously. Exploration is different from the way things were written before, and this Jody scene is a good example to use as a tiny moment to metaphor the entire writing style - especially since this is Carver’s own writing.

Up to this point first the tragedy that started her story happened, then she had an episode where she was friendly but served entirely as the local police as a pre-established character. Then she had some fun character MOMENTS (dr monsterface, helping Bobby with the leviathan). In 7x12 she and Sam have a moment of sadness about Bobby, but she hasn’t opened up about her grief about her son and husband. Bobby referred to it obliquely when emotionally blackmailing her in 6x04, and in 7x12 she bonds with Sam but very surface level about the plot and solving it together except for that mention of Bobby. This is genuinely the first time I think they’ve actually TALKED about her losing her family, except for showing it in the recaps to remind us who she was. It brings Jody back to reality as her own self with her own past and issues, and the show is taking the time to explore how she feels and defines herself at this point in time. And it’s not just a passing thing because she’s caught off guard and emotionally vulnerable in this scene - which, sure, reason we get this whole chat - but from this point on Jody episodes are actually ABOUT Jody as much as they are about Sam and Dean.

-

Skipping through these episodes so quickly has reminded me that Crowley is using “Roderick” as his name in this scene because it’s his actual middle name. Since Carver took 2 years off the show, I suppose this is a “i did my homework” nod.

-

Although, bleh, Crowley starting off the date by subtly negging Jody, and having her fall for it. Ick. She IS supposed to be emotionally vulnerable to Crowley in this scene as a massive terrifying power imbalance especially when we know already he’s only there to kill her or use her to emotionally blackmail the Winchesters. It’s not fun to watch, though :P

-

In any case, more “you don’t pay her enough probably” acting when Crowley says they share loss, like, no recap needed but I suppose they were doing season 8 only stuff in the Road So Far so if you wanna remind us of a previous season in an opener or closer you have to flashback to it >.>

But yeah rather than it just being something they throw into the recap at the start, now Jody brings it up and talks about it for the first time since it happened. We can ASSUME she has been Winchestering her way through the loss by burying herself in work etc but increasingly enjoying the thrill of fighting evil. But she hasn’t addressed it, really, not even in the scene about loss she was in last season.

-

The pep talk to the mirror is pretty legendary :P

But then also this is the last thing Jody says in this episode except for choking noises and then we don’t see her again for 8 episodes and a whole hiatus, so I am pretty annoyed that this is it. We have a reminder of who she is, yeah in a deep down character way, and I love that she cries about it, that that line about it not being a date until she cries sounds kinda funny but really betrays all the grief and how hard it’s been for her to move on in all this time, even if she thought she was ready to start dating again, maybe in the last year or two since Bobby died… Crowley tricks her and takes advantage of knowing her to a terrifying degree, including manipulating her about the loss and we never see her question that. She tells herself she’s acting crazy and I think that’s meant to make us yell at the screen in her defence, but gets wayyy too close to agreeing she’s being crazy because she’s opened herself up to so much danger, when Crowley is obviously the one at fault here.

And then we see her fall on the floor dying and it becomes about The Man Pain™ but not in a way I enjoy, and we don’t even see her recover when Crowley ends the spell because they cliffhanger on does Dean capitulate or not, and they don’t even mention her again in the episode. We can guess because Crowley asked them to meet him at Bobby’s old place that they could have dropped in on Jody and checked how she was doing if they thought they had time, but none of this happens on screen or is referenced happening off-screen, so it pretty much just stops there until she brings it up again next episode. Which I will be moving onto right now since there’s no point watching the rest for The Man Pain™ on a Wayward Sisters watch, and 7x12 was an exception because Grief Episode relevant to a Grief Season :P

-

*idly watches the cold open and intro while eating a sandwich*

It’s so weird watching an episode from before Sam and Dean had assigned seating at the table.

Or where they open a conversation asking about Kevin :<

-

Also weird to skip right through Carver era and start here of all places. All the intrigue has gone down, except for, obviously, Sam continuing to exist while possessed by an angel, and we’re just killing time before the plot twists. But I feel like I’ve completely hopped aesthetics, leaving season 7 behind. Jody calling them in for a case is Carver era. These casual extended character relationships, sense of home, Sam sleeping by a bowl of cornflakes that they can actually stock for themselves is Carver era. There’s dynamics of home and family that never existed before this and I’ve just dropped right in the middle of it :P

-

Jody calls Dean to get him on the case, which I may or may not have noticed before. It’s sort of weird looking at it in such microscopic focus on her story because at this point she’s had so little contact with him and her point of bonding was entirely with Sam in 7x12, the last time she was around. It’s possible they have a generic no. for cases which also happens to be the phone Dean carries around (and in 9x07 Sonny was calling on a personal number of Dean’s - we only ever hear the “other OTHER cell” answerphone but that means there’s 2 others and Dean keeps 3 phones in rotation and this very episode reminds us he has one charged up and hidden in his coat). If they gave her new numbers after the Crowley encounter including new in case of emergency numbers she might just be trying out a generic number so she thinks.

Dean immediately puts the phone on speaker to Sam, which isn’t weird unless this episode comes right after 9x06 where Dean moves to a different planet to take Cas’s call.

-

Yeah yeah extenuating circumstances - he also does it in 11x01 also written by Carver, and only puts it on speaker when Sam comes over to ask about Cas.

-

There’s something sublimely beautiful about Jody telling them the most dramatic thing to ever here is a cow tipping, to the backdrop of workers righting the tipped over SUV the girl was hiding under.

-

“Laying off the blind dates, I hope” - the first reference to past canon, her previous trauma, and, I think I wrote in my notes last time I passed through here laughing at how Dean couldn’t even park straight, that he’s gonna spend this season being chased by Crowley for blind dates and is only 3 episodes out from his first. Yes it’s just as emotionally manipulative as what happened to Jody, but we’re not here for that :P We’re just here for Jody’s character continuity and the new focus on her as a huggy friend, and someone they clearly have a deep bond with.

Dean gets told off with a “boy” in it, Jody as the mom friend/mom stand in, while she and Sam

Dean gets a hug off in the corner reminding Jody that Crowley almost got her. Sam gets a massive hug and a new camera angle for them while Dean shifts awkwardly.

-

*wanders off to giffing software* YIKES I am deep deep down in this right now :P

-

Random thought as I wait for that to load: Sam’s hair was SO SHINY in seasons 9 through 10 but honestly a bit fluffier ever since, and season 13 is competing for The Fluffiest. Did he change his shampoo after all that teasing about how his hair is so shiny? Like, it’s his distinguishing feature among pretty much everyone they ever meet - no one has shiny hair like Gaston. I mean Sam is a massive enigma inside a pretzel for me especially about how he chooses to present himself to the world. We have SEEN Sam evolve from season 1 so we know there’s deliberate choices going on there… He should not just be the Guy With The Hair to us

-

oh thank god the giffing software loaded, I might have been on the verge of serious Realisations and detours :P

-

Jody then refers back to all the weird stuff she’s seen and how she now thinks anything is possible, and this is the final step really of just confirming for real that after that build up and subsequent absence, she’s back as a viable cop friend for them who will always be there as an actual character, friend and asset. She can start MotW episodes for them, or help them on cases, begin to adopt the wayward stray on the show, or as season 12/13 finally begins to do, actually reference they are using her as help just off-screen phoning her up to borrow police resources, no questions asked.

-

DEAN Jody, are you sure you’re, uh, to jump back in the fray?  
JODY This wackadoo stuff keeps coming. More I know, better armed I’ll be.

I got some stuff to say about Carver some more because really he set us all up for where we are now, so it’s going to be much harder to ignore theeemes. The talk about if it’s a dragon (those are things??) reminds us of the previous dragon episode, which brought back Eve, who was a failed attempt to make what Amara turned out to be. Eve was a primordial locked up mother, brought back and even using Mary’s face (so in the long run with hindsight you can definitely say the show BUILT on that and if you watch it all blind and take it on the level where the writer is dead and it means what it means, they’re all aspects of each other cycling around and around and you try not to think about the writers struggling to express what they actually mean here…) It wasn’t dragons - it was a flip around of the virgin thing that it was a female aspect doing the punishing this time, and all that. Which makes the shadow of Eve that much closer to the surface in a roundabout way. Again, shortly before Dean gets the Mark - it’s more like the thematic BACKSTORY being re-trod.

Also in the previous scene in the car park Jody talks about how she’s churchy now and how a higher power seems relevant. In this universe, eeeh. Not when we know what God is like. At this point it’s ironic because he’s been gone a long time after a “back off” message and that’s the last we heard of him, and RIGHT NOW they’re dealing with the fall out of the angel fall, caused by Metatron who was trying to get God’s attention, as we later hear when he’s talking one on one to Chuck. Again, it’s just this sense of dropping right into Carver era after leaping all the other set up and seeing these things discussed back to back with no surrounding context, which just seems to bring into focus all the more clearly the thematic groundwork.

And of course Jody’s glorious return to form after passing through a near-death experience has made her more religious, and she herself is sort of “reborn” although she never took the oath, in this episode she is eventually deemed “pure”, since her blood kills Vesta. I see her as sort of an early mirror to Mary’s return, almost. Bringing back this complex multi-layered female character as more than she’s ever been before, and letting her *exist* in the story. This episode is about her as a person, and 9x19 will expand on that into how she was/is as a mother and how that loss and grief have affected her etc… Obviously getting there soon after a pit stop to meet Donna, but as I was saying back in the start of the Jody stuff, she is a mother first and foremost, and giving her Alex to mother is an incredible choice that they had no idea would resonate and grow in power like it has. But it’s using Jody’s POSITIVE motherhood traits (she has never actually died despite all the threats, never been fridged, and 8x23 is as close as it got, using her for The Man Pain™ but at least giving her character a little kickstart again when she did return. 9x19 is sort of like the progression of her rebirth to beginning to find her way back, restart her life, and begin again from scratch in the new context of the world as she NOW understands it.

Because now she lives in a world where witchcraft and dragons and zombies and leviathan and old Greek gods and soon old Roman gods are a thing. Though she lost her family to them, now she can rebuild her family from the people who’ve been through this same change of state.

-

JODY Wh– angels? You’re joking.  
DEAN Don’t get your pants on fire. They suck.

Meanwhile right after she reveals she was churchy now Dean says this which I feel is more like a note to self, harsh comment to Zeke, or whatever. Obviously the brief window where Cas isn’t an angel but angels did all the bad stuff to him (or made Dean do it). I don’t think, though, that Dean really classes Cas with “the Angels” anyway - the Angels are always trying to kill Cas.

But yeah, expanding Jody’s world view, and catching her up on the world she lives in. At least they don’t go off against God, but I think like that woman in 9x03 said, belief is a sort of personal thing regardless. It helps Jody through this time (because she is still coming out of her grief, as 8x23 showed she was only just tentatively trying to move on but still crying in all her dates). Alex makes fun of Jody having a cross thinking it’s a vampire hunting tool, but we get some more on that then, anyway. I like that Jody is one of the characters who has faith - maybe because she’s kept out of the mytharc. I’d love to know how Mary’s is holding up. On the plus side, absolute belief now because God’s sister brought her back… On the other hand… wtf the fuck was that all about, and then everything else since then happened too :P

-

Sam comes back to the motel to a snarky Jody! She probably guesses there isn’t much hope for Sam having had any revelations about church, especially because she seems to know of the group but isn’t a fan.

(Part of the internalised misogyny of this episode is Jody being so dismissive of the church group but UGH honestly I trust some of the guys on the staff to write better women than Jenny Klein… This one episode just makes me really so angry about how she characterises the women in that group because I mean, they seem to represent the 7 deadly sins or something ridiculous, but I have no idea if that was conscious or she’s just putting nasty traits on them because she thinks church group women are contemptible. And I am so not religious or defensive of them because of that or anything, I just hate the portrayal of these women.)

Anyway Jody is making light fun of Sam, probably knowing what he was getting himself into going there. (I think it’s important Sam was eager to sign the pledge and happy to try unloading in a coded way. He talks about his own romantic history and how it hasn’t gone well, and now he’s joined up with Jody for the rest of the episode. I think it’s important he’s had that self-reflection and un-burdening because the episode is seriously going to pair them up now.)

-

I absolutely LOVE Jody’s matter of fact telling of the tragic sex life of the other couple that got taken, and then the smiles she and Sam share. I mean Jody blatantly tells it that way for his amusement and so she can share that smile with him. Amazing.

Sam and Jody are bonding over sex pretty much this whole episode and I love it :P I think this is part of why in 12x06 (and I just assume Yockey did this same journey as me) Sam is so cool talking about sex with Jody, because she’s rapidly escalating out of any potential “mom friend” zone with him, and into, well. Jody, whatever she is to Sam.

She’s also wearing light plaid, with a dark green Henley style shirt underneath. Parallels to Mary in 12x23 when all burdens were lifted (here I assume because Jody is pure even if she goes on blind dates and refuses to make that promise :P) and of course to Dean or Jack in season 13, as Jack mirrors Dean without going full plaid, and Dean’s wearing dark plaid to mourn. Because underneath this fun outer layer, Jody is still pretty messed up. I’m reversing Dean’s season 13 parallel back to her but really I ought to say it goes the other way, that Jody is an earlier example of this >.>

-

Jody sounds so concerned/amazed when she asks if dragons are a thing… Honestly I love her so much. Kim just makes Jody so interesting. I’m so immensely glad I’m doing this rewatch because the more I focus just on her the more I realise how even my casual love of her before was built on top of this deep reservoir that Kim’s made of Jody :D

-

Anyway Jody and Sam sit quietly and work on their laptops for a bit, and then Jody picks her moment after Sam gives up after another attempt to call Dean to tell him to not break his vow under any circumstances… Jody sizes Sam up and pounces, and here’s the thing: she has been trying to get Dean to talk to her for years, but Sam she has already bonded with in 7x12, and here they have a good conversation, since Sam is actually oblivious of the worst bad thing about to happen to him and mostly just thinks aside from some uncomfortable memory issues, and tiredness, that recovering from the Hell Trials is his only problems… At the moment he’s a bit hampered by the narrative but at least that means it’s SAFE for him to talk about himself in this context - encouraged, even, for the dramatic irony, like those lines Dabb gave him in the end of 9x02…

She’s so fond of him when she tells him that he looks like crap… aaaaaah. And Sam smiles bashfully, like, yeah, I do don’t I, which is SO different from the way Dean would clam up, deny or brush it off. Sam starts joking about if Jody is born again, but it’s not a deflection, he’s happy with this conversation, admitting with his smile and eyes like yeah I am not doing great lately, but this is a much more important thing to ask. (And Sam feels he CAN ask it of Jody. Dean can’t even face Jody knowing what porn he watches!)

They are genuinely bonding and laughing together. And Jody says that LINE and it’s so cute and borderline flirty but not like hitting on Sam, just being open and honest with him in a way that makes him feel amused and closer to her…

JODY Oh, Sam. I don’t make promises I can’t keep.

Bahaha.

Also I think this is important in further dismantling that Jody is a mom figure to Sam. She just isn’t. They may just be really good friends, but they’re genuinely fond of each other after 2 serious hang outs, and Sam knows all her trauma so it doesn’t have to get weird on date night. >.>

And that leads to Jody talking honestly about herself and her losses, and sharing a “Ugh Crowley” moment with Sam, who can relate.

I have seen Jody comparing Sam and Dean’s “something special” to herself and her dating history, from people drawing a “Jody ships it” reading, but honestly if you follow the thread of the conversation she’s talking about church and things to believe in. Which links back to 8x23 (which is Sam’s current big trauma and also I guess Jody’s but for different reasons :P) and how Sam had the whole ordeal in the church to try and prove himself to Dean, and then the promises they made after that. Which, again, people think is kinda shippy like, marriage vows level shippy, but Carver destroys that in 9x01 with Gadreel’s “there ain’t no me” line and again in 10x23 when Sam and Dean are randomly fighting and bring it up because Carver wasn’t done mentioning important stuff.

Anyway comparing the codependency to Sam’s religion, and Jody thinks it might be a GOOD thing with Sam to have such a close good bond with Dean - she sees Dean as the object to be saved, the abstract Big Brother to the guy she knows and has bonded with, who seems cool but distant and troubled… But she knows how much Sam cares, can tell they’ve been through a lot together and are always at each other’s sides. That’s her surface reading, and Sam shuffles and scratches his head and looks uncomfortable, because THIS faith has been tested recently, and he’s unknowingly about to have it utterly OBLITERATED. 8x23 is NOT a good moment in the narrative, especially not for poor Sam, who was willing to die to prove himself to Dean…

-

OH LOL in 12x06 Dean is weird about Jody knowing about his porn, but in this episode Sam waves the DVD at Jody and implies very well that Dean’s super into her, and Jody just sighs like “OKAY”

-

And Jody gets the break on the case because of course she does, she’s great, and this is usually her secondary role - unless it’s a Buckleming episode the writers usually let the tag along solve the case instead of a Winchester :P

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Hi it’s been 1000 years I am still confused and bitter about why a certain investigative journalist who knew her town and its people inside out couldn’t work out who was driving the racist truck until a Winchester told her from her OWN research

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I do love this Sam n Jody scene because they have to rush to include all the missing exposition at the nearly 30 minute mark.

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Jody’s implied “yikes” about staying celibate for 30 years.

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I mean seriously, like, Jody tells them where to go from the map, and rapid fire Sam’s like what about a weapon and she goes to the other tab and just tells him

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They are power duo

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Aw Sam

Jody judging him for not being a virgin too :P

I’m just saying, they’re like, BFF levels of comfortable with each other if you don’t wanna ship them, which is fine, because that’s fantastic, they’re sleep over lying in the same bed telling each other naughty secrets levels of close if you want a good friend for an AU for Sam to rival Dean and Charlie :P

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The “what the fudge, lady!” person Jody punches swears like Donna which makes me think maybe that’s part of why Jody had issues making friends with her - Donna superficially reminds her of a whole subset of women she apparently has very little time for. It’s very superficial, though - Donna is infinitely better written than these women and her job next episode is mostly to be completely oblivious :P

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Sam and Jody save the daaaaaaay

Dean unscrews some stuff.

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Jody yelling “SAM!” and running to his aid… my heart…

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Jody’s reaction to Vesta being total fear but then immediately getting really disappointed like a disapproving mom.

I like that she uses her mom power to distract Vesta briefly. She doesn’t get a shot in but it saves her from immediately being stunned or whatever.

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Noooo don’t stab Jody!!!

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Jody stabbed Vesta :D Got the kill, did ALL the freaking work, except for unscrewing the thing.

We’re so proud of you for all that dramatic unscrewing.

Hey you don’t think “unscrewing” is symbolic of something this episode? :P

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Anyway Jody is off, carrying her own damn bag, arm in a sling, wearing a slightly more grey than before but still basically white set of plaid, because that’s just her colour scheme in this episode, I guess. Her “pure” white which was always a little muddy has some more shades of grey in it, but she’s still survived everything they’ve thrown at her with a pure heart, and it’s the heart not the liver that matters.

Also surviving yet ANOTHER near-death in short succession, and coming out triumphant and all - yet more stuff that goes from “pls don’t kill her off” to Jody being an episode-stealing delight who basically made the entire case happen and solved it herself with Sam and Dean aiding her but not much more, and got in some more quality bonding with Sammy… Yep, good week for her, all things considered. Even getting stabbed helped her solve the case.

Unlike when one of the Winchesters has a thing like this, like 5x17 where Dean stabbed the whore of babylon that he shouldn’t have been able to stab, no one questions it, and it’s left for us to see the connection of stabbing and blood on the stake etc showing us this about Jody.

She is defending her town, and basically just adding hunting the monsters that set up shop locally as an addition to her regular job… Unlike 7x12 where she joined Sam on the road and found a case out of her jurisdiction, this is also sort of… narratively re-settling her, because she lost her local connection after Bobby died or left Sioux Falls, BECAUSE he left and he was the anchor up there. Now she’s the anchor to the area!

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Sam hugs her again, and Dean gives her a quick hug, and off she goes!

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I’d watch the deleted scenes but the DVDs are 2 ft away and I’ve reached the territory of stuff I have on my laptop so that’s not happening, even though there’s the HILARIOUS scene where she interacts with Gadreel.


	9. 9x13: YOU DESERVE BETTER

Oh cripes this is one of the classic The Man Pain™ episodes around here and no one has time for that.

Donna is one of the more fascinating characters of this line up, because she was basically introduced as a comic character, for this episode, embedded in its personal nonsense. She’s Not Jody which completely plays in her favour for her return in 10x08, turning them into a Dynamic Duo of clashing personality types, but I’m assuming in the here and now after we had tough, sensitive, sexy Jody storm through an early episode in the season, Donna’s here to be almost an anti-Jody - a sheriff who’s a little bumbling, very sweet, and totally, utterly oblivious to everything going on to do with monsters and in a rarity for named, moderately fleshed out side characters (that is - embodying more than 1 trope at a time), escapes the episode with NO CLUE monsters exist despite even getting chowed on at one point. Going to the spa actually incapacitates her instead of making her helpful, so they don’t get her following them around holding a gun and flashlight while wearing a bath robe. Which would have been awesome, as well.

I think in some ways it’s super positive for Jody’s role even with her being absent this episode because it conjures Jody up regardless… there’s the Fargo vibe still, but Donna is sort of telling us Jody is the badass, in the know hunter who probably swears up a storm, has been making lewd comments without restraint within the bounds of what the show can imply *anyway*… And yet to me Donna is a kind depiction of this anti-Jody, who is also a good, interesting character in her own right and celebrated for what she is as much as standing out for what she is *not*.

I know there’s a feeling that Wayward Sisters only became a plausible idea when Jody adopted Alex, but I think Donna sows an early seed because her characterisation here is unique, playful and interesting probably *because* she was a one-off character that they then responded to the love for to bring back. And this shows a lot of things that season 10 basically made canon about fandom with 10x05 anyway but worth repeating. In Carver era they seem to be listening better to the fans and not scared to respond to fan favourites by rewarding them with more episodes. Charlie came back in like every other Robbie episode in season 8 and has been back again this year already.

The emotional storylines relying less on a sense of impending doom and more on an ongoing exploration of the inner lives means that random characters who imprint on us, should have imprinted on Sam and Dean, and might be worth another go not just for our sake but because Sam and Dean have an ongoing investment in them. And that’s not really something that was nurtured before, like, Garth. Charlie maybe, although Garth came back first, in 8x06, and she in 8x11. And of course people really liked Kevin so he exceeded his original purpose and since the tablets thing seemed like a great idea for more expansion of the mythos anyway, we get a bunch more Kevin through season 8 & 9\. If people start joking on twitter about how Donna and Jody would be an incredible duo, 10 seasons in you start thinking, well what else do we have planned anyway to fill all these episode slots, and are Kim and Briana free for a fun episode at the same time? A noteworthy side character suddenly isn’t just some colour in the episode, but a potential friend and ally. Like real people act :P

But, anyway. Right now we don’t really have a strong attempt to connect Donna to the wider story or themes like she’s being introduced for anything more than what she is - a one off character mirror in such a specific way you’d think there’d no way to re-use her thematically, so she’s absolutely unashamedly a goofy character embedded in this location and this story. (I kinda hate how Sam later calls her “fat-sucker Donna?” in 11x07.) But for the most part it makes her utterly magnificent. Because she’s embodying some weird themes for Dean and his self-esteem and his inner turmoil of the early part of his deconstruction, but manifested in such a weird way because everyone in this episode is sort of goofy and strange. Because this is not the episode you write when you’re seriously starting something (I mean COMPARE TO PATIENCE) but definitely what you want to write when you’re just having fun with some characters and writing something to lighten the tension between the fights.

And the fact that they could even entertain the idea that people liked the goofy sheriff, that her character would be worth MORE than the one-off goofy side role where she didn’t even discover monsters were real? Well… they accidentally left themselves a massive opening to devote a proper episode to her discovering that for herself.

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The episode opens with all the angst angst angst that was hanging over 9x08 not happening yet, and Sam and Dean arguing again, as a sort of recap argument/set up for the even bigger argument at the end of the episode. Yaaaay *scrolls past The Man Pain™ and sends them on the case*

Time to break the tension!

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Sam and Dean wait awkwardly in the police station, looking vaguely uncomfortable and not talking to each other. A literal ball of sunshine barrels towards them. :D

Might as well turn this into a character study of WHY I think she worked so well and got herself a spot on a spin off at least based on this first episode. Because again, aside from breaking the angsty tension that even Garth was kind of not really more than comic relief in the middle of it all, where it was still really obvious we had a bunch of angsty tension, this feels like actual cobwebs being blown off.

A LOT of it, really, must be in the performance and I’d guess the direction (Phil helped write 10x08 after directing this so him liking Donna a Lot clearly helped :P) but she has incredible chemistry with them and instantly brings Donna to life in a way that can’t be bottled. She is right in their face, low-key aggressive and ready not to take their shit, but sweet and friendly on the surface layer, and within moments leans in conspiratorially to convey some basic plot information to them. You’d start thinking immediately she has to have more to do with this episode than the opening exposition dump just because she’s hogging the scene so much. And off she walks still dropping plot exposition, chatting to another character to hand them a folder as she goes so clearly busy, on top of things, and giving the Winchesters only as much attention as she needs to do, while still being animated and full of personality to mimic the sucking noise, while talking about how a guy got sucked dry and like, practically mummified, and she’s just pouring coffee.

At this point I think my friend Cat actually began to suspect there was something weird and plot-relevant about her when she grabbed a doughnut (and again, making cute but assertive noises to let them know it’s strongly advised to take a doughnut right now, acting the heck out of this scene). Like, just because the opening scene was about food and Donna’s now linked to cheerfully eating as well. It seems like a cue to tell us to remember her for the plot, but instead it will be for character development stuff.

And then Briana is willing to do ridiculous food humour, shoving the doughnut in her face, getting powdered sugar on her mouth and having it rain down on her tie, making her, of course, a blatant Dean parallel. (The only reason I can imagine she’s a Dean parallel is specifically for their later conversation but also for this one exact moment where Sam’s having issues policing Dean and food when Donna is setting the social standards for them to meet and Dean is happily going along with it because DOUGHNUTS and Sam is trying to make him eat politely, when he and Donna are practically having a competition to see who can get the most powdered sugar on their tie.)

And she leans into the accent, and turns the silly dialogue into something really fun to listen to as she acts her way through it - she makes everything she says seem so important because Donna sounds so EARNEST about it all.

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(Ironically, Briana is preggers in this episode, and Jody gets all the Fargo references.)

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*synchronised doughnut eating with Dean, and after all of Sam’s stressing, Donna just looks at Sam, chewing with her mouth half-open*

*cut to next scene*

I mean seeeriously, if you want to make a character memorable, that’s a great start just because she’s so unlike every random police person they have to talk to in an episode. And they go to a lot of police stations and had a lot of random talks, but there’s still only a handful of named characters who seriously stand out from that lot, and a handful more you remember for their affectations rather than their connection to the plot. I liked taxidermy sheriff from 12x18, and that affectation was so we’d remember him being weird for later.

If Donna hadn’t even been in the rest of this episode but HAD had this exact opening scene I’d remember her fondly as the doughnut lady from 9x13 that Dean bonded with forever. But as it is she was being given oomph at least to make her memorable through the episode, which had a whole cast of really strange strange people. (And, after watching 9x08 earlier, NOT people who were being treated critically. A lot of them were actually weirdly sympathetic, even, like, Wayne McNut once they talk to his secret girlfriend afterwards. Snymelo aren’t my favourite writers, really, because they have made some truly bizarre missteps despite writing a Gold Star Classic SPN episode in their previous adventures on the show in season 6. But they know how to make memorable moments and characters…)

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*Skips ahead to Donna at the spa* Well, catching the end of Dean talking too much about tofu. I think the other thing about this episode and I already mentioned it, but Phil! Phil also brings things to life and catches random goofs and improv and nonsense and sticks it in the episode. On a good day he can squeeze so much out of the characters.

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I think Donna going in for her treatment is also the Bechdel test pass of the episode, which is nice. We haven’t had a good pass since the windbag roomie in 7x02 :P Jody interacted with the woman at the church group to get her virgin blood and punched her, but Sam was hovering the whole time and the entire thing is so un-feminist about the characters I want to scream so I don’t think it counts >.>

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She’s such a fun comic character without being the butt of a CRUEL joke… Dean got to be exactly what she was in the first scene with the doughnut nonsense so there’s no criticism - they’re equals in powdered sugar drama, and she’s being goofy but it’s sweet about being scared of cupping - and making a is that an innuendo or not side eye to the concept. And pulling such a hilarious face while sleeping in the massage chair. Like, again, it’s the lack of fear about looking weird when she does it, coupled with Donna having an absolutely sweet nature but in that assertive way where she’s not afraid to talk or comment out loud about stuff which sells the comedy and makes Donna such a great character.

She genuinely comes off competent and strong willed but ALSO goofy. Even if it’s a comedic personality, it gives her depth that we HAVE seen her in her element as a competent fast-talking cop (but with the cutesy mannerisms and doughnut thing but that was like, talking to them on her super-powered coffee break), but now she’s on vacation and putting herself in a vulnerable place - naked and unintentionally hilarious and sleepy drugged up talking as she drifts off, losing every last bit of surface layer to just enjoying the pleasure of how warm and sleepy she is…

You know who else we see in a massage chair this season? Crowley in 9x23. She’s maybe an INCREDIBLY light mirror of what Crowley offers Dean - indulgence and all, but Donna in a self-care, comfort, be yourself way that inspires Dean to tell her she deserves better, while empathising with her and maybe they’re both still a little woozy. There’s a couple of character mirrors in this episode which reflect on Dean wanting someone to treat him like their “Princess Jasmine” or whatever (or he admires Larry, who looks after himself and is super fit even if he doesn’t seem traditionally masculine and is ALSO a goofball, he’s still a “warrior” and later will actually try and fight the bad Pishtaco… not a good omen for the nice parts of Dean surviving, although Donna does at least, because she wasn’t ALSO in the toxic family metaphors, just let down by the promise of a physical change to make her better, AKA the “cupping” mirrors the Mark…)

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Sam’s poor poor yoga class. I think he nearly killed them.

He goes for a high five with one of the guys and doesn’t get it, which I think tbh is more of a social awkwardness mirror with Cas than anything else, like, wow, you’re as bad as Cas at going undercover :P The mirrors in this episode are all pretty light and funny, even if I just got kinda deep with the Mark parallel, all these scenes are hilarious and it only gets very dark at the very end.

Case in point, Donna getting wheeled towards Sam, looking like an absolute goddess, and blearily identifying him because she’s not an idiot and that’s what moves the case along, as well as “sweeeet potatoooes”. Later in 10x08 Dean blames her for nearly blowing a case for them, and I assume Sam dragged him to deal with Donna ASAP because they had to let her in on their undercover work once she made them, but it may have sounded way more dramatic to Dean at the time because he’s got the Mark this whole time so not super friendly and kind :P I guess everything escalates because it was what made Larry go investigate and break into Baby and realise they were hunters…

Bless him, he’s got so much spunk, it’s just a shame he tried to fight a monster >.> I suppose no one ever messes with Baby and lives to tell the tale even if Dean doesn’t kill you personally…

Anyway Donna’s still trying to figure out wtf happened as Larry wheels her away and Sam gratefully legs it.

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Oh! Hehehe Donna is wearing a pINK Henley underneath that dressing gown. She’s the opposite of Jody in every way!

I love her

First thing she does (now she’s a bit more back to herself) is apologise for ditching them - again, actually being at least professionally minded, even if she is taking a vacation and me day.

Which she has every right to, but I suppose depending on how murdery it gets in your town, do you bail to go on vacay or do you cancel it and reschedule? Honestly Donna putting her own happiness first is quite positive, especially as The Sunniest Dean Mirror. She’s bathed in sunlight, sitting up against the window of the room. And again in a massive chair where she can almost hold an audience like a queen. She does somewhat hold the case in her hands, although she has already tipped off Larry, so telling them to eff off at this point probably wouldn’t make things MUCH worse.

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And a good Dean mirror, tbh, because her trousers are pink plaid pattern as well. All the pink just reminds me of Dean and pink……… 

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Also Donna sassing Dean that “she doesn’t give a flying fudge” - again, more cutesy swearing like those other women but she’s so assertive with it - it’s blatantly a FUck You and she just chooses to use cuter family friendly vocab. Her tone is so confident and pleased with herself - she’s selfish about this in a reasonable, understandable way and we’re not expected to judge her for it because her sassing Dean is ADORABLE and this language seems to make her harmless, while also her tone does not :P

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And then she goes from defensive and angry to quiet and vulnerable when she decides to open up about Doug - again because communication is key and the Wayward Sisters especially thrive on good communication and bringing that theme into the show…

She may be sad about it but she doesn’t keep it all bottled up inside. She owns what she’s been through and that she’s trying to turn her life around and recover. And like Jody, she’s in a bad place, with a divorce rather than grief, but even in her much fewer episodes we can see she’s working hard to turn her life around and recover and move on. Maybe the spa isn’t a long-term fix but it’s a way to boost her self-esteem and maybe help her start a new path. She sees her weight as something she did to herself - her self deprecating laugh at guzzling her pain is SO Dean it’s scary. She plays it off as cute but it’s so covering up great depths of self-loathing, especially betraying how Doug has done this to her and worn her down. I think you could go so far as to parallel Doug to John, as the source of the utter lack of self-esteem, and Donna trying to be what he wants her to be, and her specific “doug” issues standing in for Dean’s issues with his father and the various ways they manifest. (Crowley has played off them magnificently to help Dean get the Mark >.>)

In season 10 Dean occasionally tries dieting and restraint but can’t find a way to happiness through that. Obviously the Mark is a problem for him that can’t be surmounted that easily, but in the long term just losing that first 10 pounds - sucking the Mark off his arm and externalising it into Amara - might have left him still haunted and with the weight of it on metaphorically on him,  but he could fight back and begin to truly try to assert himself against the Mark… idk, the metaphor works :P When we see Donna in season 11 she references cross fit and dieting and basically that she’s controlling her weight successfully and is definitely doing much better… She even manages to reconcile with poor Doug2, who she’d been alienating all episode.

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“Doug’s a dick, you deserve better,” says Dean. And THAT is also one of the catchphrases of this whole enterprise. These characters deserve a better show, better attention in the narrative, and that means not leaving Donna here, but to pick her up and carry her to another episode. To let Jody fill the hole and adopt Alex, and carry on thriving after. And for Claire to reappear in the story after six years, damaged by that missing time, but now with the characters and story trying to make up for it. It’s about recognising that they deserve it, and elevating them.

Also, of course, this line made me ship Dean and Donna so hard that even in my Destiel shipping lizard brain while catching up on what I missed after I quit season 9, in this brief 5 episode window before Metatron slammed me back into the Destiel trashcan, I had a subconscious thought that Dean could totally do a Lisa with her and show up on her door at the end, when he’d been through everything, and he just worldlessly hands her a box of powdered doughnuts…

I still wouldn’t be majorly pissed about a Dean/Donna ending.

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Donna then talks about having a “Dark” time because LOL Dean mirrors. I was pointing out the emotional backstory to Amara being in 9x08 although perhaps somewhat unacknowledged, as the overlooked and forgotten woman, and the strange threads to Mary’s return, but now we have Dean’s side of it reflected in Donna, going through his darkest time and guzzling his pain until he becomes a demon.

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And Donna laughs it off but is clearly in such deep pain, and we see her stop laughing and look down and shake it off. Because she’s a slightly less damaged Dean mirror, who shows her pain in this clearly broadcast way to draw attention to Dean doing the same things, burying himself and shaking off his moments of emotional truth, being goofy and careless with herself… but then admitting she came to Canyon Valley because she wanted to feel pretty again (while looking absolutely stunning, bathed in warm sunlight) and that this place has done it for her. And it’s sad with the full context of the episode because we know Maritza genuinely just wanted to help people, but that this isn’t a sustainable, natural way to lose the weight and overcome things. Donna does so much better when she’s fighting back… But I do think this at least gives her the push to break through her depression and fight back… But she’s still going to need to confront some Dougs to get any real closure here. Leaving her on this note that it’s helped but they had to close the place down, leaves her future in her hands. And of course, because she’s a good, positive mirror, when we next see her she’s still carrying that sadness, but she’s still bubbly and hasn’t let it get her down, and she’s working hard at the cop retreat.

Anyway her personal demons are comedic but they’re not treated frivolously to her character, which gets a lot of respect, and she’s allowed these really dark moments even in her first episode to show there’s more deep down.

In the wider context of this episode a LOT of the side characters open up to Dean and she is a part of that landscape, I’m just writing exclusively about her, but she IS one of the most fleshed out characters, except perhaps Larry and Maritza get some both funny and moving bits and are the main interesting characters for the actual heart of the mystery here.

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Donna also starts getting into the mystery by deflecting back onto the Winchesters (wow, who ever gets to do that :P) and asking why they’re here. She shows off her cupping mark (I accidentally put a capital M on that, first try. Oops :P) and Dean’s like “cupping?” in about the same tone Donna asked about it so you know what 100% confirmed that was an innuendo from her too :P

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And to round off the Dean parallel, it was the salty and sweet pudding that did her in too…

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I still can’t believe how ballsy Larry was to break into the Impala. RIP you brave crazy health food warrior.

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Anyway, that’s Donna for the episode, except for standing in the background once the on-duty police show up. Sam and Dean wrap up with her off-screen, and probably just mostly check that she’s bought the correct story, confirming that Donna never worked out what was going on here, and that she’ll be filing reports that don’t draw any suspicion.

We don’t get to see the aftermath for Donna, except that she’s bundled in a huge coat, and acting back on duty now that there’s work to do here. They can leave her to her life, so they think…

But she deserves better. :)


	10. 9x19: THANKS BERENS

This episode is the first true Wayward Sisters episode of this bunch, introducing Alex with the clear intent that should (and when) Jody return, she will have Alex in her life as an ongoing relationship. And seriously setting up Jody as the pure-hearted mother figure but with some key differences (aka not making Jody a pure sacrificial mother in the process).

This is the first time Jody gets an episode where SHE is the closest to an emotional POV and Sam and Dean are treated like outsiders on her turf. (Which they are, literally and emotionally.) She is right about Alex, she gets the big kill again but this time the emotional confrontation is lengthy and ties into an entire episode of her grappling with what Alex is to her and against Momma’s brainwashing of her.

Dean is just about entirely consumed by the Mark now (9x18 really kicked this off, Bloodlines doesn’t count but LOL that the other attempt at a spin off is nestled up against this), and then we get into the final run of plot episodes where Dean crumbles under its weight each episode), and Sam - Sam’s not exactly checked out but in 9x22 he’s still double-checking with Cas that the Mark really is as bad as it sounds, and he’s struggling hard. He’s lumped in with Dean a little when it comes to the treatment of Alex, for Jody’s sake.

Jody is calling the emotional shots here, and this episode puts together everything that’s happened to her so far and kneads it all together.

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I like how the recap shows all the violence about “are you ready to jump into all this” but then switches to Sam and Jody’s quiet conversation in 9x08 (and again, that episode is establishing who Jody is again for us) we have her own words to paste over the horrifying memory of losing her son and husband again.

Although it’s talking about her being churchy, that plays a minimal role in her characterisation from here on out except for Alex’s comment about the cross, and instead the focus is on Jody needing *something* that makes sense again to have in her life, as the line to lead us into the episode and cut immediately to Alex as the answer to this. (Doesn’t mean she CAN’T be religious, just that this is not the answer either for her for what she really needed.)

As I was saying, religion is not quite a firm thing to hold onto in this world and while JODY isn’t critiqued for it, and it’s a nice thing for her personally, religion is critiqued heavily what with the mytharc we’re building to with God and Amara. What this story runs on is family and ESPECIALLY found family formed through hard fights and blood and pain. This makes it pretty clear that what Jody needs to hold onto is something like Alex, and it also does explain that since we’ve known her she’s been drifting along in grief trying to find things to do and cling onto, whether it’s helping Bobby, or later Sam and Dean, or trying out dating, and church, the hole that’s been so hard to fill is missing her son, who she never got to have a relationship with beyond early childhood.

Alex is supposed to be 16 if the date of the episode is the date roughly in canon (it’s hard to tell :P) and though we don’t really know how old Jody’s son was, they look about the same age when she was abducted (8), and though she was abducted in 2006, during season 2 ish, she is still closer in age to what Jody’s son WOULD be than not… (a teenager, at least, and not right up in the college age part of it like Claire) So there’s always something sad I’d found in Jody sort of picking up where she would have got back into it if she’d got her own son back. (Which, incidentally, makes her comment about getting her family back in 12x06 kind of even more awful because her initial bonding IS filling this hole and Alex is very much representing what she lost, but female and maybe a couple of years older)

However, of course, Jody acknowledges all this but I’m getting ahead of myself, I just love so much that before this episode even opens the last words are the key themes about what JODY needs from this, but at the end she communicates honestly about it, and leaves it open for what ALEX needs too.

I guess this is the mini meta if you don’t want to read all of it because I guess there’s not much to do but watch the whole episode here. We don’t even have Winchester Angst Cornflakes to skip because it’s not their story right now.

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Alex getting introduced via the angry teen arresting method… Claire steals it from her but then their stories branch dramatically. I suppose difference is we know Claire and her backstory, or at least can guess exactly where the damage and neglect come from. Alex is being introduced as a completely unknown entity so Claire can play off that and it’s quite clever to ask us to fill in the gaps knowing what happened at least one side of all that missing time and then how we find her on the other side of it.

Here, though, the episode runs on a constant sort of edgy insecurity about who Alex is. She was angry, then she was vulnerable, then she know the vampire that comes from her, and he threatens her that she can’t run or hide or escape. Although he’s talking about dragging her home and hurting her, thematically this is about her identity, that she has to face who she is. The episode has a subtext of adolescence and growing up, with Momma trying to keep Alex a child and Jody stepping in to nurture her to womanhood.

Fittingly, of course, once the vampire makes these threats, Jody appears from nowhere and chops off his head, which creates a nice loop from the end of the recap, through the cold open, to explain that Alex fills Jody’s void and Jody is there to help guide Alex to who she needs to be.

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And after the title card we stay on Jody’s car, which is a little jarring in its own way just to say, oh, no private time with the Winchesters?

I haven’t blazed through all of season 9 enough times but I know it becomes familiar to see them at home before a case in the way of it being the first full Bunker season. I often think when they skip an opening in the Bunker, that it’s because the episode might be long and packed, but on a first view when I have no idea what’s coming next, it HAS been long enough since they have the Bunker that it’s odd not to have it in the open, and sometimes you get an episode like this, where that disconnect from home and therefore from their emotional POV is just part of the story.

In 9x08 they drove triumphantly in, but here they drive in and we see them through the windows of Jody’s car until they basically pull up in front of her - the directing does a lot of good work here to emphasise this point.

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Sam and Dean have their contraditory explanations of how they’ve been since 9x08, Dean lying because he doesn’t open up to Jody, and Sam admitting it’s been touch and go because he trusts Jody. However there’s no hugs and we go back to another shot watching them through the chickenwire fence and emphasising the outsider sort of feeling here, and the constant prison imagery of the end of season 9

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How comes Jody opening up the back of her car is never included in gifs of Sam and Dean looking into the boot of a car? Anyway I guess it’s a “we’ve got work to do” parallel FOR Jody, again sort of a constant series of rolling pilot episodes for Wayward Sisters going on now :P They basically all work until the real thing kicks in.

-

They tease her about being all grown up, which does seriously point out that Jody is considered competent enough now by the story to deal with non-plot monsters on her own. She goes on to describe Alex as, of course, not having a name, and being feral. In a raw state of humanity. A blank slate for Jody to help into being a good person once Alex shows her true nature by the end of the episode - a parallel to how Jack is tbh (not that this is a rewatch about The Man Pain™ but hey I guess Jack and Kaia are the colliding of these two shows so he has some relevance to start with…)

-

Sam is the one who gives Alex the invasive mouth “swab” which makes him look much harsher and meaner than you’d expect, so right off the bat it’s not Dean in his Mark descent manhandling Alex which you may expect by this point, but Sam is being made unsymapthetic too.

Of course from Alex’s POV we hop to her in the interview room, getting a nasty invasive thing done to her mouth by someone wearing gloves and weilding a swab they found somewhere, which further strips Sam down to an unknown scary authority person, and makes us sympathetic to Alex being treated like this.

-

Alex then immediately calls them out on being hunters, cutting through the crap, and although she’s in a bad place, she’s insisting on the truth. And she should do - she has no way of knowing who these guys are, but hunters operate outside the law because they literally are a bunch of people who took the law into their own hands about monsters. There’s no regulations or oversight and Jody gets lumped with the paperwork and the waving them through on their lies. With a strange sheriff their access to her would be just as illegal as a friendly one - only difference is they have no fear of being caught >.>

-

(More prison imagery, more shots to make them look terrifying, more reasons to sympathise with Alex)

-

Jody pulls Sam and Dean away to discuss getting the first level of Alex’s identity, “Annie Jones” which is the name she was born with but not a name she eventually keeps for herself, even when she’s free, as she has had to shed the baby name she once had and the ID she had before all the trauma etc which made her who she is.

Jody empathises that Alex has Stockholm Syndrome, Dean does straight to her being untrustworthy and protecting the next, because they were sold out by the Alpha Vamp’s blood slave in 7x22 and he has no interest in being tricked again while he’s in such a bad place.

-

Sam and Dean keep up the united force against Alex thing, both sitting opposite her at the table, side by side, arms folded on the table hands clasped, a wall of judgemental dude. Jody wasn’t in the interview room before but now she’s overseeing. Sam and Dean INSIST Alex’s name is Annie, and she says, no, it’s not.

She takes it back to choice, saying SHE chose to feed them, when she’s basically accused of having been kept as a captor to be fed off of. She insists they’re family because they looked after her aside from the whole feeding and using her as a lure thing (a detail she’s keeping back for now anyways because of course it makes her look even less sympathetic to eyes like Sam and Dean are coming off, especially since it’s the most thinly veiled metaphor ever).

(There’s a lot going on here with chosen family and how it can be toxic, with the “scars built up over years” thing relating to the Winchester’s own trauma and how they’re forced into the codependency, as a build up to the sort of stuff demon!Dean will say on the other side of the hiatus. It’s making a very, very bleak mood around Alex’s intro)

-

Anyway they carry on talking condescendingly to her and she talks about how it was time to move on. This is because she at the core WANTS to break the codependency mirror of being a blood slave/lure, and of course she already ran away but they’re putting her on the defensive and she has no idea how they’ll treat her or protect her or just blame her like she’s as bad as the vampires for what she’s done. In 11x12 the guy basically says she’s worse than the vampires because she was human when she did all that to him and that’s echoing her inner feelings about what she’s done.

I went into this a lot in my main rewatch notes for this episode, about this as a coming of age thing with Momma wanting to trap her in eternal teenagerhood in a twisted reversal of the trope of her reaching adulthood. She struggles against that and wins and is allowed to grow up.

-

> DEAN  
> You didn’t think this out, did you? What would happen, who might get hurt – your, uh, “brother,” for one.
> 
> ALEX  
> His name’s Cody. And she killed him. [motions to JODY who is looking on]
> 
> DEAN  
> Because of a choice you made. These are the consequences.

This is basically how she and Jody’s relationship starts… Jody has set in motion Alex’s feeling she can NEVER return to the nest - Cody offered her a chance to come back before they knew she was gone, but Jody took it away. Now Alex feels trapped surrounded by awful people who are threatening her or killed people she considered family - but that family is worse because they’ll kill her.

Eventually Jody kills Momma for her, in front of Alex after Alex makes her bid for freedom by injecting Momma with the dead man’s blood and they overcome this that it was Alex’s choice and she has rejected her evil family and she comes to understsand that Jody DOES care and will be able to help her.

-

Again, Jody is thinking about the name - about what Alex must be feeling and what is personally motivating her and what has happened to her, emotionally. Sam and Dean are quickly researching how to find the vampire nest and kill them, showing their distraction to the practical side of the job of hunting things. Jody is deep in the “saving people” side and she’s   
already got Alex in front of her, she needs to work out how to EMOTIONALLY save her.

-

Of course Dean calls it babysitting :P

-

> WOMAN  
> Did I help your shut-in kid sister get away from her weird, scary-ass squatter family? Answer’s still “no”.
> 
> […]
> 
> MOMA  
> You calling my family weird? Oh, honey, you have no idea.

“Weird” as a concept - came back in 13x01 to be called out for describing Jack that way, of course. A healthy element of the show is pointing out everyone is normal in their own way. A found family are people who can cope with each others’ “weirdness” and understand it - TFW have personal empathy to Jack since they’ve been through his sort of things a million times. And this episode ends with Alex pointing out Jody can understand what she’s been through.

-

In the meantime though, Jody takes her to a creepy cabin in the woods after getting her out of jail, which really can’t look good from Alex’s POV when Jody tells her about not running off in the woods, and only here taking off her handcuffs, but from Jody’s POV is painfully nostalgic of her lost family.

-

> [Inside the cabin, JODY is unpacking groceries. ALEX is walking around the living room. She takes a crucifix off the wall]
> 
> ALEX  
> You know this doesn’t work, right? On vampires? It’s useless.
> 
> JODY  
> That’s not why I have it.

I love this moment so much. It’s more amazing character stuff for Jody, just that this is a separate part of her, a part she’s allowed to have despite the vampires and the fact the universe is set up against faith once you know too much (like poor Dean >.>)

Alex thinks Jody is being a corny old vampire hunter who doesn’t know her stuff but Jody knows what’s what and this is personal to her. She’s allowed to say, I have something for me not for this job, I’m not consumed by the job, I just take care of hunting concerns on the side to my real life, while I try and look after myself emotionally. Maybe the faith thing isn’t relevant to the job but the job doesn’t have to be my whole life? I have a full time job as a Sheriff after all… :P Faith isn’t useless to the person it matters to, which is the exact same message Cas got from the woman in the church in 9x03.

-

> ALEX  
> Where are they?
> 
> [JODY doesn’t say anything.]
> 
> ALEX  
> Oh. Dead.
> 
> JODY [taking the picture back]  
> You know, there are about a thousand more polite ways you could say that. I’ll give you a pass on account of the whole raised-by-monsters thing.
> 
> ALEX  
> How’d they die?
> 
> JODY  
> Horribly.

Between “raised by monsters” (or, well, not respecting Jody as an emotional authority figure yet) and Jody on the defensive, they have a fairly honest snap back and forth at each that reveals some weaknesses for Jody etc but in the long term is the set up that Alex knows how Jody lost her her family, at least in the way that matters, and from there she knows Jody IS safe to open up to…

-

I keep talking up to the end of the episode but this one especially is balanced allll on getting us to a specific conclusion so pointing out how we get there for that is really fascinating, as it’s all a really carefully built game.

And the end of this scene feels a lot like a stalemate getting nowhere draw between them, with Jody on the back foot for allowing Alex into her personal space full of her personal items and memories for Alex to judge. A brief metaphor for the pain of letting her into her heart later anyways. And again how in 12x10 Jody says she would still give anything for Owen or her husband back, even though by that point she considers Alex and probably Claire too her daughters.

-

[obligatory Fargo reference]

-

I love how there’s a pizza box on the table behind Sam and Dean while they interrogate the vamp they catch here, because Alex’s role was essentially bringing them pizza home.

Sam and Dean go and take his word on Alex being basically evil for what she did, off on their unsympathetic side of the story, because he gets to them with an “aren’t siblings annoying” spiel which of course blah blah impending Mark of Cain disaster

The fact it’s in a vampire’s words rather than Alex’s own should be the massive feminist tip off for why this is the Wrong Approach to her.

-

And in this flashback example of her being a lure, the man asks what her name is and she says “Ann” and he says “Sweet Ann.” This is like the nail in the coffin for her old name and the themes it represents. The vampires are specifically using her to pick up paedophiles to keep off the radar of eating low lifes no one will look too hard for… She is made to use a version of her birth name - the little girl name - to endear herself to these gross men, while Alex, the name the vampires gave her, is the safe identity for her. This vamp has already called her Alexis and it seems like one they use for her among themselves and of course was the full name of the Alex that Momma is replacing. Alexis is the vampires perception of her - only Alex is the name she can choose for herself.

-

Then the vampire accuses Alex of enjoying it and says she’s “as bloodthirsty as any vampire” despite the fact the set up is that if they use her to lure disgusting men then she is going to feel some vindication that she’s clearing up the trash of the world and that’s something to tell herself to sleep at night… That she might even feel good that they went home with her and got torn up by vampires rather than carried on hurting other girls.

-

Anyway it’s used to build the tension that Sam and Dean immediately identify her as a threat and we go to the scene with Jody, where the tension builds only for Alex to be anything BUT a threat after Jody is momentarily worried.

I love love love the symbolism of Jody walking into Owen’s old room and looking around at all his old stuff and then seeing Alex sleeping in his bed. Obviously where the conclusion of the episode takes place too. And in this case she’s sneaked off to crash out after saying in anger she doesn’t want to sleep, and chosen Owen’s room as a safe place to do that and aaaargh. My heart.

And Jody immediately pulls a blanket over Alex with a maternal feeling at catching her here.

I don’t think it’s just the jump scare that makes her sound so emotional when she talks about the sandwich waiting for Alex.

And Alex shows some weakness too in exchange for the promise of a solidarity sandwich, with her first “human” act (aka not being “feral”) to ask after her grandma.

-

I think I’m blatantly repeating myself from my old-recent rewatch of this episode but eeeh :P

-

Of course Sam and Dean are cut off from telling Jody their bad intel on who and what Alex is because Jody has to make her own opinions and defend Alex and not listen to Sam and Dean getting a toxic interpretation of Alex, believing it and trying to pass it on to her. In this moment she has to ignore that nonsense, put the phone down and protect Alex no matter what.

-

And Alex IMMEDIATELY yells for Jody to help her when the vampires burst in

-

Jody then making it clear she doesn’t care about going to finish the job just because there are vampires to kill and they know where they’ll be, but because Alex was under her protection - she and the Winchesters at complete odds over saving people hunting things for this case, with her a competent hunter but completely on the compassionate side basically to counterbalance the dark spiral the boys are in.

-

And Jody takes Alex’s age as the proof her consent to kill people can’t matter and she was made to do it because she was kidnapped, while Sam and Dean who never had childhoods and all that are like yeah she’s old enough to be a monster and also does she even want to be saved? (Well, ASK her but first of all consider SHE RAN AWAY IN THE FIRST PLACE.) I think Jody can see Alex running away was a cry for help because that’s something as a Sheriff she ought to know about teen runaways IN GENERAL as training for the job and dealing with a community of normal folks. She KNOWS Alex has been raised by monsters because she already commented so many times on that affecting her morality, but she’s also seen Alex starting to come out of it and asking after her grandma, meaning there’s hope for her, and her beginning to remember her old life.

And Jody has faith that Alex can be saved, or that they shouldn’t give up on a girl so soon just because of how she was raised.

(This episode has Sam catastrophically following Dean’s lead on the emotional tone - I say I love Berens writing Sam a Lot and I think if you look at 9x06, 9x14 and this episode in succession it’s clear he already gets Sam, but what he does here is subtle enough in just letting Sam go along with Dean without a cue that this is what’s going on beyond the actual actions, and Sam doesn’t disagree with Dean once along the way, that I think it’s commentary on Sam’s ongoing obliviousness to the wrongness infecting Dean, and it’s only at the end he realises how far Dean took it and that he had followed Dean all the way to the point of “Look at me, bitch” which was his getting off the ride point. It works well to illustrate Sam’s feelings about all this while alse making him step back so Jody can lead the emotional charge to save Alex, and make the episode wholly about her, and it’s so clever I have to assume that there was a ton of wank I never saw, despite this being the first episode to air after I hit up tumblr I was following just a couple of blogs and mostly looking in the meta tags and missed any and all wank about his behaviour… :P)

Sam questions Jody what this is about - the first time in the episode though we’re 25 minutes in that anyone suspects Jody has motives beyond altruism, though we’ve seen stuff about her family and history and faith already.

Unfortunately also again aligns Sam with Momma who openly mocks Jody about it - but this is the order of the day. He doesn’t mean it in a BAD way he’s just confused and lost in his own way about remembering to save first.

Blah blah codependency feeding scars metaphor

-

Alex wakes up on her incongruously flowery pink bed in the Murder Basement, which has direct visual parallels to Dean’s bedroom which of course is another sneak demon!Dean warning, as Alex is going to start transforming on this bed and this is very much a Momma = Crowley, Alex = Dean sitch.

But the flowers also show the attempt to keep her locked in childhood, that this is about her innocence that Momma has wanted to preserve and now the twisted coming of age, to lock her into youth, to make her compliant completely and never leave home and always sleep in a flowery pink bed.

-

Omg Alex’s boots in 9x19 look like Claire’s in 13x10… Maybe it’s their style. Maybe Claire stole ‘em :P

Headcanon accepted

They ARE Alex’s vampire boots after all… I bet Jody bought her a whole new wardrobe if she’d needed it…

-

Momma immediately being a terrible parent stereotype by blaming Alex running away on all the family getting hurt and like, look at the mess you made, rather than understanding her bid for freedom, she blames herself that she didn’t crack down on Alex’s attempts to be her own person sooner, that she let her get too close to the cusp of freedom.

-

I’m guessing to Momma the core family is her and Alex, and the boys are disposable goons

-

Anyway she guilt trips Alex into immediately opening up with “i love you momma” rather than explaining herself immediately, showing how trapped she is here. We can see the emotional blackmail at work that we can imagine twisted Alex into being loyal to the family.

Alex explains that as she got older her conscience - her human empathy - was getting too painful and she couldn’t cope with being responsible for any more death.

She’s going to have to let her entire awful family die to start over though, which is one of the scary subtle messages to re-apply to Sam and Dean, though I think the demon!Dean period does sort of do that for them.

-

“I’d rather die that feel that way again” re: the guilt of killing people. Of course Momma’s solution is to turn her into something less than human to kill the feelings of guilt… Hey Dean parallel :< But Jody can save Alex… And Alex can save herself.

> MOMA  
> It was so selfish. I wanted to watch you grow up. I kept putting it off. Don’t you see? These things you’ve been feeling – all the guilt and suffering – those are human feelings. It ain’t too late. I can take the pain away. And then we can stay together, as a family. Like none of this ever happened. Wouldn’t you like that?

:<

And of course, short term, that pitch works on Alex because it’s the easy way out of feeling the guilt and dealing with how she’s been raised in this way. Momma is of course ALL the toxic John Winchester parallels - as Crowley is to Dean - that she is going to have to reject.

-

> DEAN  
> Jody. This is a raid, so tread lightly, stay close. Priority is clearing the nest. Alex comes second. You got it?
> 
> JODY [annoyed]  
> Got it.

… She’s not got it, these professional hunters are being obtuse so she’s going to slip away and prioritise Alex - she’s literally there for Alex, not to be their handy back up that they might try to protect (at least on a better day).

I haven’t talked ALL that much about Jody’s perception of them, but this episode is one of the first ones where she has much fact to face with Dean at all, since in the previous episodes she and Sam worked together while Dean needed rescuing. She’s finally getting some real time with him and he’s deep in the Mark of Cain spiral and she’s seeing a different side of Sam - this cold version of him, who’s under his brothers’ influence. She seems to have the most contact with Dean when he’s in the worst place… Honestly… But even if she has spent more time with him recently in 13x03 I think it’s worth remembering that 9x19 is the first time she works a proper case with Sam AND Dean for the entire time and from the start they’ve been acting like this. From outside eyes, the Winchesters are not coming across well and it’s Dean’s fault.

This is obviously not a critical comment towards Dean because lord knows I love that guy and understand the Mark of Cain arc from HIS perspective, which I follow in my rewatch that’s about The Man Pain™, but I think it’s worth tracking Jody’s meaningful contact with them, not least because from OUR perspective she’s EMBEDDED as a beloved character at this point, possibly because reoccuring characters are an island in a sea of Winchester angst and this episode literally makes her that. So we have a lot more expectations about their relationship than I think are strictly true, about how much they know or care about each other, or why Jody and her comfort should be expected when in reality she may not be as comfortable with Dean as she is with Sam, or to understand that her constantly reaching out to Dean if he wants to talk is part of a pattern of her trying to get to know the angsty Winchester she knows least, is perpetually less honest about his feelings with her, and she wants to understand and help but clearly feels Dean has to come to her.

At least in season 12 this finally seems to shift, and they have better interactions like that lovely touch in 12x22, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be pretty professional and not really open up in 13x03 when Dean’s right back in a foul mood…

-

I love how “winsync” this episode is them splitting up, and getting knocked out and captured together

-

Meanwhile Jody hears Alex’s moans as she goes through the transformation and heads down to save her. Sam and Dean deliberately put aside somewhere else so she can deal with the real issue.

-

“I’m sorry, Jody. I made my choice.”

“She chose me”

Arrrghhhh. It seems like the darkest moment but Jody can emotionally pull Alex back not in any way like swan song parallels or whatever but for the sheer desire to be human and connect with Jody and Jody putting her humanity out there. But in the mean time… I mean let’s just refer to Cas’s line in 10x03 about humans feeling such profound pain and why would you want to go back to that even though you know it’s the best choice for your forward journey as a compassionate being who wants to do good…

Anyway it’s been about Alex’s choice all along but it’s clear that Momma manipulated her into this choice, and that it was the easy way out.

-

Alex resists feeding from Jody because she cares too much to do it. Another victory for Alex along the way to fighting for her humanity…

> MOMA  
> Made an impression on my girl, I see. Baby, this is the human half of you talking. After the change, this human – she ain’t nothing to you.

The fact she describes Alex as having a human half after being fed vamp blood but before she feeds - when it comes to choice, Alex has been put on the threshold of deciding who she is and her actions will decide what SPECIES she is, and her future ability to be either a monster or compassionate and begin to deal with the guilt and atone - in the long run, go to nursing school and try and save people the traditional way.

Also of course interesting that it IS a literal version of how Jack is acting - that his actions make him good or bad instead of grappling with the grey area.

-

Jody’s face as Momma accuses her of having “some hole” that she’s trying to fill… GOSH Kim is a good actor. I’m so delighted that good things are hopefully coming her way with this spin off - and in general that she’s got to be such a beloved part of the show and fandom.

-

> JODY  
> Wow. That’s pretty rich coming from the woman who stole Alex to begin with.
> 
> MOMA  
> I have fed her, clothed her, loved her going on nine years. You think motherhood’s just about blood? You don’t know the first thing about it.
> 
> JODY  
> Maybe not, but I know what it isn’t. And it ain’t about forcing her to be like you the second she becomes inconvenient.

Momma subverts the “family don’t end in blood” thing, but at the end of this Alex chooses Jody because Jody understands about caring EMOTIONALLY not just about providing the physical needs and this sort of porcelain doll collector item thing that’s going on with Alex - Momma talks so possessively about her in the previous scene while talking about letting Alex get too old.

And of course, once again Jody is having no bullshit about Alex’s choices. Everything the vampires make her do, she was forced to do.

Momma’s love is cold and empty because it’s entirely self-serving and a memory of her love for her child back I guess before they became vampires and whatever happened there. I mean so much cool motive still murder there isn’t even an explanation of her full reasons for replacing Alexis with Alex.

-

And Momma says not to believe Jody because she wants to save her own skin, but Jody is trying to save ALEX. It’s selfless love.

-

Jody realises that Momma is replacing Alexis because she has no shame, and that Momma doesn’t even love Alex for who she is, just who she is replacing… This whole thing is just one long powerful moment but argh. This in particular, that Jody acknowledges her own pain but only to throw it back at Momma. Jody HAD Owen back after his death and she led the whole town in a “this is totally normal that the dead have risen” mindset because she wanted so desperately to have him back. It’s not even just that Alex is replacing a one-time hole, but a hole Jody has had to face TWICE. She understands filling it.

> JODY  
> And it still hurts. You still feel it, the loss, the pain – like a stone in your gut. It hurts just a little bit less whenever she’s near.

Jody’s got this totally unique experience and it’s *beautiful* to see it used like this. That she’s recognising her own feelings about Alex from having done this before, that she DOES feel protective and like she wants to mother Alex, but she understands why and how it has hurt before. And how tempting it is to keep someone past their death…

-

Oh god the parallel to Momma calling Jody bitch and Dean saying “look at me bitch!”, another link between Momma and the guys.

-

However now their argument comes back up as Dean harps on it but Sam is more compassionate still and says to save Jody.

-

She’s fine though, Momma attacks her but Alex saves her, by turning on her evil mother in order to save the one that offers her hope and humanity.

It HURTS Alex, and she has to say sorry, and Jody understands it’s going to be hard for her to watch, no matter what Momma did to her.

-

AND THEN THAT VISUAL PARALLEL of Alex not watching in the foreground, that was used in her flashback about her being bait where she would walk off and not watch the vampires kill the dudes, now she’s not watching Jody SAVE her from it. So that Jody can try and prevent her from one MORE emotional scar on top of all the others because who knows how long it might take her to adjust to the truth of how badly Momma manipulated her and made her feel guilty about everything - since she had her so twisted up she would drink her blood.

-

The apology scene is a bit weird, obviously rehearsed between Sam and Dean to apologise to Jody for disagreeing with her when Alex ended up saving her life. Jody says they were right - not that Alex was bad but that she had been too invested, because Momma’s words have at least made her extreeemely aware and realistic of what she’s getting into with Alex, and at least self-aware of not overstepping the line of taking on Alex because she wants a new child, rather than to do it for Alex’s own sake. Which goes to show that what could have been poisoning Jody’s mind is actually giving her the exact approach she needs to KEEP Alex.

Jody talks about burying her feelings and how it’s bad and how you have to address it… While Dean of course is going down his dark spiral full of buried feelings which will explode out when he’s demon!Dean.

-

“After it’s done, you know what to do with her?”

… adopt her and raise her for the spin off, I think.

I’m pretty sure my last rewatch I just posted that last conversation while flailing about how perfect Jody was and I don’t really see any reason not to do it this time…

-

> ALEX  
> I want you to know that… When mama offered, I just… I couldn’t  
> disappoint her again. I had enough to be ashamed of as it is. Jody, I-I’ve done things.
> 
> JODY  
> You don’t have to explain. I know. Whatever you want from me, I’ll give it. If you want, I’m here. But what you’ve been through the last 48 alone, losing your entire family, everything you’ve ever known or loved – no one can understand that.
> 
> ALEX  
> You can.


	11. 10x08: COMIC RELIEF INTERLUDE

Honestly it would have been a crime to go any longer without a buddy cop comedy with these two.

-

There’s something slightly surreal about starting the recap (“You were a demon! You still have the Mark!” “That’s going to be an issue…”) and realising you’re just as out of the loop as Jody is when you skip like this. She had no idea Dean even had the Mark and I skipped from the last episode before shit hits the fan in season 9, to the last episode before demon!Dean build up in earnest (Bloodlines ignored, laughed at and dismissed because not the spin off we were looking for), and now suddenly I’m in a nice lil stretch of episodes about my girls after Dean recovers from being a demon, the stretch where they’re trying so hard to pretend that everything is normal. And of course, it’s Claire who changes the course of that…

-

It’s interesting that it’s vampires again, who are rapidly becoming the stand-in monster in this part of the show anyways - they’re useful to take random cases to blow off steam because they’re easy to show on screen and easy to understand mechanics. They can be Donna’s “first” monster and we can recap what happened with Alex all in one go without being too suspicious.

The recap puts in the clip of Owen getting shot and eating Jody’s husband when Jody says “horribly” about how they died, making it more obvious for people who need a catch up and all, but kudos that they have stopped inserting it when Jody talks about her past, because Kim can convey it so well with a word and a look.

And then angst screeches to a halt, goofy music, and the Donna recap which is pretty much entirely her whole role in 9x13 because it was such a short thing.

-

“Doug’s a dick. You deserve better.” “You betcha!”

How is that not a set up that this is how we go into the episode and it’s all about Jody and Donna meeting. If Dean won’t marry her than Jody seems to be set up to be this “Better” Donna deserves - it’s the same empty space I talked about at the end of the 9x19 recap which introduced Alex to be what Jody needed. And once the gory and extremely well-executed cold open blood splatter (100 points for style, best on the show, honestly. Iconic.) is over, we start the episode on Jody’s face.

-

She’s kind of our POV character again for much of this, but Donna gets to discover the supernatural all for herself, which is great SHE gets a look in, and though Dean still has the Mark, he and Sam are CONSIDERABLY more light-hearted and cheerful and repressing the angst this episode, which means that we get to see them chilling in the Bunker too, as I was saying in the last episode about them being excluded so that we would only get Jody POV and them as hostile outsiders.

This episode is altogether more friendly and fun (and honestly this rewatch has been bouncing between the two extremes as I either catch these characters being used as light relief or for Trauma Town :P) and basically serves to counter everything in 9x19 which was hostile and miserable in this specific set up of introducing non-standard main characters.

-

And I love that Jody gets to do these comedy beats! The last few times we’ve seen her have been pretty dark and Too Real for her, and it’s been great character development… But let’s have her used expertly as the Hardened Hunter Cop On A Bad Day against Donna’s sunshine.

-

Having all these episodes together also is really nice that it feels like they are considering the Wayward thing at least in some form and they are saying they wanted to do it since bringing Claire back as a more demographically appropriate known face, which is of course next episode. Jody is accosted by the vampire who wants some cash from her, and Jody asks how old she is, hears she’s still a teenager and sympathetically gives her cash. It’s showing Jody has this kind streak a mile wide for the wayward kids, even the ones she isn’t really in a position to randomly adopt. Of course if you take this action as her start of season 10 and her off-screen accepting Claire into house as the end of her season 10, it’s a very neat bookend.

-

The “Hibbing 911” comes right before we see Donna and if nothing tipped us off sooner, it would be that :P

AND HERE SHE IS.

Luring Jody over like heeeeeeeeeeeeey we’re going to be BFFs!!!

I mean she is literally so friendly that is not dramatic irony in my snark for once that’s just Donna’s tone of voice

-

And immediately she leans into Jody’s face and tries to get her to smile, and she’s standing there surrounded by yellow flowers shoving a yellow lollipop in her face. We don’t have to be subtle about the symbolism in a comic moment. Donna is the sun breaking over the dark dark dark valley that Jody has been in.

Jody’s concerns include that she left a kid behind - it’s been at least 4-5 months since she picked up Alex, but when it comes to permanent life adjustments that’s still not enough to get truly settled. When we see her in season 11 it’s been partially manufactured by vampires to make her happier but also just you need a year or so to truly begin to adjust.

Her hesitance to be happy on her own sake is something that carries over from the end of 9x19 - her not wanting to selfishly take on Alex just because it would fill the hole in her life, even though Alex DOES, Jody has to take it on somewhat as a duty or kindness to Alex at least initially, though I think she quickly comes to love Alex “properly” aka what Momma was NOT doing to Alex. :P

I think in some ways Donna accosting Jody like this, telling her to smile, and all this unsubtle sunshine imagery, partnered with their later suspicious colour coding (which only gets more suspicious with season 13 colour-coding Jack this way) as Cas, to Jody’s Dean, is to make a direct sunshine commentary. As a buddy cop duo, you need balance, light to dark, happy to grumpy, sunshine to the thunderclouds Jody is depicted coming in on. But thunderclouds that break for wayward girls in need, regardless of how else she acts and feels. I suppose this is just a sort of… complementary imagery of how Cas saving Dean filled a gap Dean didn’t even know he had until Cas was there - in my rewatch over last summer I picked out all of Dean’s issues with faith that would later make Cas thematically and emotionally good for him. To challenge him in the same way we get the comedic version of Donna challenging Jody.

It definitely feels like the set up that even in this opening moment, even though they don’t see each other on screen for another 3 years and Donna only appears one more time in season 11 and not at all in season 12, there’s an emotional continuity that she and Jody somehow *belong* because they are immediately the sort of tropey bounce off each other pair that just works.

And as I wrote about a lot in the 9x13 notes, Donna was introduced just as comic relief. And of course in 5x15 where Jody is introduced, she’s there with a tragic story/later backstory… The changing atmosphere in the show with this better emotional continuity for side characters and a sense of lives lived outside the Winchesters and so on, means we are starting to get these episodes which are not from their POV but are about the people they’ve encountered. Donna and Jody are totally unknowing that the other has met the Winchesters, and to Donna it’s weird but maybe not the weirdest thing that’s ever happened. To Jody she probably has to suspect she isn’t the only law enforcement the Winchesters have met and stayed on the right side of, even told the truth if it would help them protect their town, but I don’t think if she had to expect anyone to have encountered them, it would be *Donna* even on a first glance.

So. Perfectly balanced intro where neither are remotely suspicious of the other for their mutual acquaintances the main characters of the main story… :D

-

Ah man, I forgot how much of a dick Doug is. I mean I know he’s a dick but his entire smaaaarmy attitude along with the stuff he does.

How dare he hurt her :<

But it lets us see that that one little crack Donna had in 9x13 which lasted a fraction of a second is her own darkness and character depth, and it might not be as messy or important to other people/the fate of the world, but it’s still horrible to see such a happy character who is a literal beam of sunshine in the imagery being put down, and then to sound so hurt.

Jody knows it’s not her place to intervene (right now) so she gives the Most Knowing Look and sidles out of frame, caught in the awkwardness of small town affairs, basically.

-

And we just DROP IN on how Sam and Dean are doing in a rare first spotting of them which doesn’t give them a case, just reminds us they exist because it’s 5 minutes into the episode, before we get back to the real story which is already underway in Stillwater

-

At least the character dynamics, a little exposition for the vampire sheriff… Doug looking at a thinner blonde cop like heeey and the thin rationale to force Jody and Donna to be partners on this before they’re officially partners on the hunt.

Considering last episode was about how heartless vampires are and that Alex was going to sacrifice her human half to be a vampire, now we have one trying to escape the life and do good and help people, because vampires are *not* all scum, it’s not the end of the story, it’s still a choice once you ARE a vampire about how you let this affect you. And Dean, having his descent mirrored to vampirism the entire time, is right now in that state where he has, again, a chance to CHOOSE to be good and not give into the Mark. I think the core reason for the stuff happening in this episode is to have the good cop sheriff and the you can’t fight your nature vampires who are conscientious about their eating and recycling like Dean’s gonna just kill the monsters that need killing and tell himself he’s doing a good thing (like Alex luring paedophiles), but next episode it all catches up to him and he kills humans. So this sort of serves as a last time for him to feel he has any control over what he’s doing here, which is convenient for the comic episode :P

-

Jody catching up with Alex, a reminder again that she’s a part of Jody’s life, how things have evolved with her. That she’s trying to get used to life in a new town and re-socialise. Which so far sounds like Jody is worried about keggers, and Alex has been smoking weed and generally has a lot of off-screen delinquency we don’t see before Claire gets sent to Jody and takes over as the more rebellious of the two, and for better or worse causes for it, Alex has been set on a better path. I think she probably relates to Claire more than she’d admit, though. :P Stuff that happens off-screen, aka Alex is going to have to go straight probably before 10x20 because Claire only knows her as a prep, or does Claire’s arrival also help shock Alex into competitively trying to keep Jody’s attention via being a better student, along with the other changes in her life? It’s interesting they have so much off-screen characterisation. Having them as the established characters for Wayward Sisters, there’s still a lot we don’t really know about them and their dynamic, although they should get on better now, it’s clear Alex has the strongest relationship with Jody and a normal life aspiration while Claire has a strong interest in hunting and only just considers Jody her mom and Jody only just has voiced it too, while she and Alex are like, Ellen and Jo “kick it in the ass” mirroring in 12x22…

-

I was about to say wow that was a detour but hey this is a rewatch specifically about musing on these characters and who they are and what we know about them and how the show has presented them so far, so I think all that headcanoning is exactly what I was supposed to be doing :P

-

I still don’t know if that look from Jody after she hangs up is like, do I really have faith in her not to trash the house while I’m gone, or a spidey senses tingling about a lurking Donna :P

-

“Looks like you didn’t get a partner” Jody trying hard not to reach out to anyone, and turning out to have quite a prickly emotional shell of her own when around ~normal~ people while we’ve seen her as the emotional release valve for Sam and Bobby a few times already casts her in a completely different light when Donna’s sunshine is beaming at her. Donna again reaches out to Jody, because she is an endless well of kindness, and she either hasn’t been popular enough to actually get her own partner despite seeming to know everyone (is this a fall out of her divorce?), or she waited to see who would need a partner and latched onto whoever seemed to be going spare at the end?

-

I love Jody’s “oh boy it’s monsters” realisation in the background while Donna merrily chats away. Jody being silent and dark to Donna’s relentless chatter. Though we already know Donna she’s just been a comic figure so far for the most part and so Jody’s really looking like the voice of reason and experience here. We know her as well as we would a character halfway through a full season of their own show by this point anyways, since she’s been in so many episodes, though spread over 5 years, while Donna is just a reassuringly familiar goofball, taking the seeming same rational approach to monsters - it’s critters in the woods! - as she did to accepting the rampaging murderer excuse in 9x13. Bouncing off her obliviousness and Jody’s weary knowingness.

-

Saaaaaaam and Jody. She calls Sam first, and Sam’s like “Dean says hi” when he hasn’t.

In any case, the consistent connection of Sam and Jody. She obviously don’t think too poorly of him since 9x19 and he DID phone her at least for the sort of help we’ve seen her consistently giving since the end of season 12 re: APB’s out on Dean while he was demoning around. Several previous episodes together they’ve had to rescue Dean so this might have been part of their usual pattern that she’s unintentionally or not some emotional back up for him…

Buuut then the fact the Winchesters DON’T get in contact with her - and the “you found him!??!” doesn’t reflect any past canon that Sam DIDN’T call her except they chose to play it that way once we get to this episode. She could have been checking in on how he was like “so how’s he been since you found him?”… I would go with a healthy heaping of shame and awkwardness that Dean was a demon exacerbated by their own issues with… the whole thing really, from why Dean became a demon, to what he did during it, to what SAM did during it. And perhaps Sam thinking Dean ought to tell her for himself. Clearly Dean, who still has the Mark, has not asked if Jody knew, assumed Sam told her, or checked in with her since it happened, and probably not since 9x19 so their chat will be the first since I last saw them communicate on screen a few hours ago my time, however many months ago theirs.

-

Sam misses the snark on Jody saying Alex is head cheerleader. Kinda just makes me laugh because 13x08 is the most recent episode right now and he had to spell out that it was a demon when Dean seemed to gather that immediately and not need to query his instinct. Maybe Sam is just terrible on the phone. But this was a season where Sam was being set up to have his choices questioned a LOT.

-

On the other hand when Jody gives them the case info Dean’s like well it’s not a vampire, though of course it is. It’s a lot of vampires, just changing their habits. This seems more like it comes under that Dean is scouring the MoL archives for info on the Mark, but his intel is wrong or his resources are wrong - he needs to know things which are not available to him just sitting in this library working on his pre-supposed safe ideas. In the long run this is that he needs to confront Cain again to learn all the stuff Cain didn’t tell him the first time. And that even Cain doesn’t have the full info and they need to learn what Death knows about Amara. And that even that all isn’t all the info because we don’t have Amara’s side of the story.

And oh gosh sorry to ramble so much but you know I have not been back through season 10 for a meta rewatch since before season 10 was over, and only breezed through it on quick rewatches to the end… I feel like trying to understand it all and what they may have been trying to say or how it holds together with hindsight is pretty important >.>

-

Dean offers to come help, Jody says she has it under control, but Dean really really want to be out there working and repressing, and so this sounds like a thing to do. It’s also dudes not respecting a female character saying she has it under control and imposing themselves on her anyway but heyooo, she loves them and puts up with this :P

-

“Screw you, Winchester.” He’s so giddy that Jody snarked affectionately at him. No biggie but he cradles that phone and maybe I ought to gif him holding it to how Dean strokes his thumb down the phone when Cas calls in 11x04 but this is a Bad Detour. *wafts away thoughts which are nothing to do with anything here*

-

Anyway we are nearly 10 minutes into the episode before Sam and Dean decide that it’s probably their episode too.

-

Meanwhile Jody is doing all the hard work, going to the morgue, or trying to. The coroner is not letting her just waltz in - and Donna opens the door for her, socialising, saying basically the same as Jody but with layers of buttering her up. And Donna is doing this entirely altruistically, not that Jody isn’t, but she has the sense of remove of knowing it might be More and that the others aren’t equipped to deal with it but she is.

I wonder if at any point she wonders if Donna is intervening because she knows about the supernatural but plays a good con… :P

But yeah between her “ugh don’t want to be here” attitude and her disdain of how bubbly Donna is and all, Donna is like “Left her manners in Sioux Falls” but then double backs to say Jody is with her, because she HAS picked her as a partner and it’s supposed to be a gentle correction not a judgement. Donna is accepting and kind and I think long-term for Wayward Sisters, introducing her might allow Jody to be kind of the scary figure of respect that Claire already measured Alex’s relationship with her against her own and all the new friends?? I think Donna may turn out to be A: waaay more resourceful than we might expect (she is going right in to checking out the bite marks expecting to see animal teeth, and not afraid to get right in there, putting on her glasses and getting professional) but also much more the fun heart of things and easier for regular emotional help, while Jody may be the slightly more… go talk for epic plot stuff chats :P A sense of having to win her over while Donna has already accepted and adopted you AND planned you a birthday party.

-

“I was afraid of that” *drama* *Donna like whaaat?* *Jody has to do a Comedy Face as she realises she got too dramatic and Donna isn’t supposed to know how dramatic this all is*

-

I also LOVE how they both team up on the sheriff of this town to get more info out of him - even though they aren’t on the same page with just about anything yet, they’re both determined to investigate this thing, have been stuck as partners anyway (and Donna’s proved she’s not useless even if she’s not a hunter) and they both want to know more…

And so they bear down on the sheriff like the dream team they have no idea they were born to be

-

The douchey deputy has been co-conspiring for a while and he pulls away the sheriff again. He’s given juuust enough camera time to make you suspicious before we get to Dean uh cross examining him at which point he’s never seen again… Almost like they were giving us enough time to warm up to his potential to be connected to the drama and covering for the sheriff… Just to make his role actually be all about what that was and we were just seeing what Dean wonders for longer so that we have the same instinct as Dean on the 3rd go around of him being suspicious…

And of course in 6x05 he was not a vampire but Dean chased him down in case he was one… Once again he’s Not A Vampire, just a false lead while they’re looking for one.

He really ought to come back in season 14 and be Not A Vampire again… :D

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GAH And after Donna was told last scene she should have a halo, Jody is like “Doug seems like kind of a *dick*”, which is a natural response but of course it’s mirroring Dean. So so much Cas and Dean blatant mirroring. THIS is the power duo you mimic, maaaybe because in comedy terms they’re the show’s odd couple rather than Sam and Dean who have a more balanced natural working method.

But I kinda super love it.

-

“But he was my dick” is the sort of literal repetition Cas would do as well.

-

Jody uses Donna wandering off to “get real” and find out about the next death. She still knows what’s “really” going on when Donna doesn’t.

-

I love the idea that Alex is having a wild party complete with some firecracker misadventure off-screen. I mean, at least she’s having fun? After going straight from 9x19 I’m clinging to anything that makes her normal and happy even in a misanthropic rebellious misfit way :P

-

Donna accuses Jody of fleeing and Jody immediately has the emotional resources to just tell Donna the truth at least so far as it’s being officially reported - the sheriff told her to not spread that it’s happening among the other cops, but Donna at least has an exemption for this.

-

I love how Donna swears so much… maybe I should go to my tag and just dig out the old gifset of them and re-reblog them… someone made a very funny one I recall…

-

And then they bond over being young and their issues with people in their lives, either Donna being upset by Doug or Jody struggling with Alex and it just goes to show having a friend can take a load off - which I think with the larger ensemble cast for Wayward Sisters, we’re unlikely to have anything LIKE the weird toxic codependency type of relationship in the core of the show which means that we’re probably going to get - praise the lord - multiple friend relationship stuff happening in any direction at the whim of the writers and who they feel like pairing up for unlikely monster killing duo of the week, and hopefully a lot more talk and support - and even if say Kaia ends up with a secret she can’t tell Claire, maybe she can talk to Donna. Or Donna is frustrated with Jody being like this *gestures at the entire first half of the episode that the Winchesters still haven’t properly shown up in hehehehe* and ends up remembering why Jody is her friend THROUGH chilling with Alex for a while or something. Mmmm mutually supportive friendshiiiips.

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Also this scene lets Jody be FUN. FUN JODY. I LOVE HER. She’s laughing!

Donna sort of transfers her happiness to Jody, or, well, she lets the facade down when Jody is gone, and sighs again because she still has her Doug issues and Jody didn’t reassure her. What Donna needed was the positive friend affirmation of that entire night hanging out to take her mind off things.

-

Nothing will ever be funnier than Sam and Dean driving in halfway through the episode and entering the Sheriff meet up like they own the fucking place when Jody and Donna have been holding the fort down for 20 minutes.

-

Dean checks out Donna from behind when Jody sends her off to get snacks and coffee while she greets Sam and Dean.

They’ve also saved the narrative some work by visiting the morgue again between scenes. See, they do have some use *pats their heads*

-

Blargh and this is the one where Dean recognises Donna “from the fat spa” which is nicer than Sam remembering her in 11x07 as “fat sucker donna” - honestly glad she’ll be more important over on WS where she doesn’t have to be remembered for that any more >.> And they add to the feeling of ganging up with Jody agreeing that Donna is annoying and a liability rather than inducting her into helping them.

Jody, at least, is more positive about her, but still as someone who needs to be protected and kept out of the life -

> JODY: Yeah, I haven’t been able to shake that ray of sunshine since I got here. She’s actually been pretty helpful, but, you know, it’s just tough keeping her out of this nightmare stuff, you know?

Sam and Dean carry on acting like the professionals who just arrived to take charge of everything by telling Jody to hang out with Donna and carry on keeping her out of things while they investigate. Again, men telling the women to sit back while they handle it >.>

(Sam n Dean come off pretty bad if you JUST watch these episodes, largely because they’re illustrating very specific things in their point and time)

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I LOVE Donna’s “aha these agents go undercover so I’m totally on top of that wink wink” and like… aaargh she’s just so adorably fun and kinda missing the big picture but so cool with what she THINKS is happening… :D Dragging out her obliviousness is so funny

It might be a lil at her expense but in other ways she’s being treated so well and she is being such a complex character, that she can be comically ridiculous but only when she’s being all cute and funny and the other characters are all too bitter to accept her just on a personal level, and they’re all gonna see different sides of each other anyways. She’s causing the teething problems especially by NOT knowing about monsters.

-

More shady whispering between Sheriff and deputy right as Sam and Dean walk up.

-

The way the Deputy mocks Dean realllllly makes it sound like he’s a bad guy… the FBI come poking around all the time and find nothing? PLEASE tell me he is also a monster and they just totally missed him. Bring him back to flirt with Dean some more :P

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Like. His character just does not make sense without accounting for the fact he’s going OTT ridiculous for Dean to react to and then go flirt info out of him. Because he’s WAY too shifty about “sure is cute to watch you try” but he only knows some tangential information and nothing about the vampires…

… literally the non-bi!Dean explanation I can come up with is he’s also a vampire who escaped their notice

-

because he flirted with Dean

-

Anyway have some on-the-nose take no shit feminism with the “douchey guy tries to makes them buy the smaller, probably more expensive gun because it’s for lady cops” and they school him. It is a dick metaphor. Jody literally makes it one.

But their little bubble of girl power is interrupted by an even more douchey dick as Doug shows up… And Jody, riding on the wave of putting the asshole gun guy in his place, rips into Doug too with some more HEY FEMINISM. Kinda have our cake and eat it because we get to see Jody defend Donna and call out fat-shaming, but also Donna is allowed her own reaction to being defended like that, especially when she tries so hard to apparently just quietly will Doug out of existence while around him.

I think it’s kinda like in 9x19 where Momma was emotionally manipulating Alex, with Doug vs Donna’s self esteem, but Jody miscalculates this one, not realising that yelling at Doug for Donna before she’s ready to let him have a piece of her mind herself and get over him (“Still not there yet” she says about surface text wanting to date again, subtext, being over Doug and how horrible he was to her - and with him showing up and battering her self esteem, of course not.)

Jody trying to reassure Donna off-hand “you are so not fat by the way” before going back to Doug is in no way the sort of self-esteem boost she needs here, because it’s all just calling attention and turning this into the conflict she’s been avoiding.

Anyway Doug leaves, shocked, and hopefully chastised.

But then Donna yells at Jody for that, because she can’t yell at Doug yet, and sees no point in doing it *even though he’s still actively antagonising her* (oh gosh as a Dean mirror for his self-esteem mirrors she’s killing me but argh stay away The Man Pain™)

Jody calls Donna a doormat - again, I think she already recognises Donna’s awesomeness in other ways like pushing into the morgue for her and so on where she is *not* a doormat so she’s just upset to see Donna act this way, but it’s too personal and they’re kind of annoyed at each other and this bonding thing as partners is noooot going well.

So Donna snaps back at Jody like she has no idea what it’s like to lose a husband, and cue angsty flashback of how they died horribly…

> DONNA: Did something happen… To your husband?  
> JODY: We all have our crosses to bear, right?  
> DONNA: Hey, I’m sorry if I –  
> JODY: No. It’s fair. I certainly went there.  
> DONNA: You want to talk about it or –  
> JODY: Not right now.  
> DONNA: All right, then. I’m gonna go get some air.

TBH this is kind of drawing them into balance in some ways, comparing Donna’s pain about Doug to Jody’s about her husband. In some ways it CAN’T compare but Donna may have had an “easier” life not knowing about the supernatural or losing anyone in the TRULY horrific ways that can happen… But to her her pain is real and awful. I suppose Jody feeling like no one can have as awful a backstory as her is leading her to treat stuff like this as too easy to solve with some sharp words because hey no one here is a zombie so get your shit together?

I think it’s nice to kind of have them have this conflict where Jody is wrong and Donna is hurt and then Donna *accidentally* hurts Jody but unthinkingly that she might have trauma too, because it makes Donna more sympathetic than just the bumbling comic character yet again to see her self-esteem issues being given this depth, and we love Jody so much as an established character this is water off a duck’s back and the dead husband zombie son montage aaalways pulls the heartstrings and we see it almost every single Jody episode :P

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It’s also the argument that leads Donna to discover the supernatural because she’s gonna wander over outside and find the Sheriff “eating” the next victim, so it’s kinda like, they open up and get aaaaaaalll their baggage on the table, at least in the respects of what you need to be sensitive about and how not to handle it (which tbh is the groundwork you NEED in any relationship just as a baseline how to care about them and what not to say inappropriately etc whether you’re ready to share the truth about it or not)… And once they’re on that level with each other, Donna now has been “welcomed” in to go discover monsters exist

-

teenie weeny handcuffs to slap on some paws

-

god this episode is ridiculous :P

-

Donna has some introspection and time to breathe on camera and seriously, how nice to see that before she gets into the investigating

And just like that her world is turned around… She can be scared and panic attacky about the monsters now, she’s gonna behead a vamp like a pro by the end :D

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Aha here’s Jody cornering Dean for the first offer of support towards his feelings. This is at the start of season 10, remember, where he’s post-demon recovery, still with the Mark, and a ways off the confessional where he starts his process towards rejecting the pain he’s accepted for too long is his life. Season 11 is the tentative first steps towards real healing. In this case he’s not ready.

Jody’s approach now is interesting because as I’ve pointed out she’s worked 2 cases with Sam and a very surface idea of Dean as the big bro who always got into these wacky scrapes, and then they do 9x19 and she sees that bad, dark side of Dean and Sam in his shadow. She hears from Sam that SOMETHING has happened to Dean, but the “You found him!” from the start suggests she doesn’t know he was a demon, just that once again he was missing. Still, she’s emotionally intuitive enough that even on basically NO info she knows something is Wrong with Dean and that 9x19 was hopefully not normal for him, at least with hindsight that he runs off so soon after…

> JODY: How you doing, kiddo?  
> DEAN: Me? Fantastic. Why?  
> JODY: Word ‘round the campfire is you went off the rez a couple months back.  
> DEAN: That right? You and Sam been passing notes during class? It’s nothing I can’t handle.  
> JODY: Just sayin’. I make a mean bowl of chowder if you ever need to talk.  
> DEAN: I appreciate that.

He really does appreciate it, and I don’t think he’s had ANY bonding moment with Jody yet, so this is the first time on screen they emotionally connect. Of course she reaches out, he shakes it off, she persists and he continues to blow her off, so she sees he’s not ready, leaves the door open and he understands what she’s saying, knows he is NOT ready to talk to her, and he looks less defensive and genuinely appreciative. Sam interrupts.

-

Donna pulling Jody away from Sam n Dean to ask her about monsters without realising they’re the professionals who last episode claimed to have taught Jody everything she knows. Hee.

Jody carries on being the emotional rock we know and love her for:

JODY: Okay, first of all, back there, I was wrong to butt in. I know it hurt you, and I’m – I’m sorry.

Now it’s Donna’s time to blow her off, because monsters. It’s more important to deal with them now, emotions later.

-

I LOVE that Sam has to be Agent Frehley again… I swear even his answerphone message is like ugh I have to re-record it even though we had our aliases ready to go. The little links back to 9x13 :D

Anyway Jody calls Sam first with info.

-

Jody tries out some lockpick from the expo I bet :P

-

SUNSCREEN

It makes me laugh so much that this is how they deal with the vamp thing on this show

yeah the sun hurts them a bit so they wear sunblock

pfft

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I LOVE the cross purposes as Sam and Dean burst in the room - Donna with no time to react more than !!!?!? to Jody pulling a machete and then all of them talking at once trying to explain what’s going on because all of them find something alarming about all this - although Jody is the most collected and I think I caught her trying to just tell Sam n Dean the sheriff is a vampire while everyone else is distracted :P

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And the boys let Jody give Donna the talk - partially just that she’s Jody’s “responsibility” but also just the whole awww isn’t she grown up thing.

Donna swears gently all the way to the car - Sam and Dean have changed out of suits so Jody has clearly been going for a while :P

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“Sheriff… Vampire”

Awww it’s like Dr Monsterface

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“It’s the only lead we got”  
“We..?”

Yeah Sam, Donna is pretty adamant this is her turf and her problem as law enforcement… And again the image of the men trying to excluse the women from participating but Donna standing her ground

“Stuff you Dean… or whatever your name is.”

Jody has never been more proud of her in her life. “Hanscum’s good.” It’s a badge of affection to get a surname namedrop like this, I swear.

And it’s because she can sass talk the boys, she has her wits about her, and she’s been resourceful and determined and Jody sees beyond the bubbly surface layer - which in itself is something I think would be a bit of a performance layer because that shut the fffffffffront door was waaay on the edge of someone catching themselves from swearing and using the appropriate ones they’ve learned to say instead… :P

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Dean tells Donna all she needs to know about killing vampires in a couple of short lines, trusting her to have a machete and to do the job right, since Jody vouched for her. Donna’s like, got it.

they’re all about to be captured by vampires but that’s not her fault :P we only see Sam and Dean knocked out, and Jody and Donna restrained.

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> DONNA: Uh, I beg your pardon? I saw you with your vampire face standing over Sheriff Goodhill.

she was such a tattle tale in class i bet jeeze

-

And Donna of course is one of the only ones who gets to free herself - she uses her reading glasses to get free, which is wonderfully resourceful… Dean gets free too because he has drama going on as well that requires him to be part of the action. But at least she gets a really great kill :D

The glasses are sort of a nerdy exterior shedding thing but it’s not a huge deal for Donna because she doesn’t get characterised as a nerd who wears glasses - more like they’re another tool she has to get the job done and she uses her tool here too.

-

Anyone who has a response to a cool beheading to instantly follow it with a witty one-liner is main character material to me :3

Jody’s FACE like wow DONNA saved me

Donna shares that wicked grin with Dean but in the next scene she’s like “I wanna hurl” as the reality catches up to her. Jody smiles proudly at her - honestly she’s kinda adopting Donna too but Donna is competent and adult and a co-worker so once the initial “woah, monsters!” wears off I think they’ll work together very well. I HAVE to assume they stay in contact even if it’s just chatter about monsters and how they’re doing and all. And she compliments Donna and Donna giggles like YEAH I’m good at being a monster slayer!!!

It is vaguely horrifying how little Donna is in the story between here and Wayward Sisters. I suspect because of her personality type she is PERFECT for an ensemble - and has 3 characters around her here and Jody almost always with her except a few personal revelations - and it will be WS’s job to start to crack into Donna’s self-esteem and flesh her out. She’s somehow woefully under utilised in her next episode despite being written by her original writers, and while this seriously esstablished her as Jody’s equal, because it takes so long, it is literally going to be 3 years before she’s back and connecting up with the core group of WS characters and after 2 years out of the story.

But Phil really, really, really loves Donna and got her this episode and got her hooked up to Jody and so even though this is just a single episode, it did ALL the work so we can have her back finally.

All I can say about 13x10 is ABOUT DAMN TIME and I’m so excited to see Donna as part of an ensemble, as being her own character in her own show, and being developed more, because 11x07 is honestly fairly disappointing to me on her behalf >.>

-

OOh on the other side of some talk about The Man Pain™ Jody DOES give Donna the Wayward Sisters speech about offering to teach her some more about hunting etc - we didn’t get to see it with Claire, even to the point of Claire coming back to inform them that Jody had said she’d teach her how to hunt - I think Claire’s story is being told for her but Jody is the way in for Alex, Donna and Patience, while Claire is foisted off on her and has her own huge arc to figure out who she is…

SPEAKING OF WHICH OH BOY I FINALLY GET TO WATCH A CAS EPISODE AND MEET CLAIRE AGAIN

*bounces excitedly*


	12. 10x09 & 10x10 HI AGAIN CLAIRE

I actually watched this through with my mum recently just because she wants to watch random old episodes and this was next on my list, so I just went with it after apologising I’d just watched 10x08 too recently to want to rewatch it… my mum haaates the Mark of Cain arc and them taking the heart of out of Dean and she was so upset about how it feels to drop into it out of the blue I feel like I’m carrying like twice the burden of The Man Pain™ as normal.

I also literally forgot this is the episode with the Burger Date in it and we got there and my mum was like “Why does he think she’ll double back!!?!?” and I had to break one of the vows of silence on this whole shebang and I was like “he wants to have lunch with Cas” because… how else do you explain?

-

So this is the first time Dabb ever got on my radar as a newbie fan - in a low key way because it was like every one of his episodes in season 10 came with an explanation and some snark about his writing from longer time fans who knew him better, all of which I failed to internalise and paid the price for it in 10x22, after which I had my eye on him all the time. A story from another time :P   
<https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/118935893993/what-does-reverse-crypt-mean>  
<https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/118940416343/elizabethrobertajones>

Now they’re touting this as the start of when they thought Wayward Sisters as a loose concept may be a thing - spinning off a known character after re-exploring them in the show. I suspect 10x08 is the real first heart of it because it’s setting up Jody’s part of it and exploring how the addition of Alex to her life has changed her or not (aka she’s a mom again now but she can still work and balance all that, it doesn’t mean she has to die of the Mom Curse of fiction, it’s not ruining her character to add a teenage daughter and I can’t imagine someone DIDN’T complain that loudly somewhere… But it was all really just because they WANTED to bring Donna back and Jody was such a fun way to match her up and tie her into the emotional part of the story and it seemed a natural fit…)

Bringing Claire back though? Inspired move: it fits Cas’s arc they tried to make for him this season, and answers an old question or six about Cas’s origins which were MUCH NEEDED for him to be a viable, sustainable character beyond the dramadramadrama of seasons 4-8 for him - perhaps this should have been addressed in in season 7 when he had no memories - would he not have been returned to his “original” family by the authorities - or season 9 when he was human himself, and, you know, maybe or maybe not crammed in there with Jimmy. But at least by this point the issues are here and that they get looked at at any time…? The feeling of unease about Jimmy ends, the damage Cas caused to the family when he was too angel-y to deal with the complex emotions involved is resolved… And in-character it’s shown to us that Cas developed a conscience about his impact on their lives with his newfound perspective AND can clear it in one fell swoop. And by the end of the season, gets to pack Claire up with a ribbon to send her to the ongoing adoration of the Wayward lot which has barely begun - it’s this season and 10x20 in particular which really gets people suuuper excited about it.

This is also Dabb’s first appearance on the list as Dabb rather than Dabbflin, and they only did 6x04 so they’re not very keyed into the WS thing. This fits what we know of Dabb era’s love of digging up old canon and exploring it PERFECTLY though. This is continuing Claire’s story and looking at the emotional impact of it, and there are only human monsters, the parallels to Rowena and Crowley, and Dean’s own inner darkness to create the tension here.

-

The recap also reminds me that this is leading on from Rowena’s big first episode, “Girls Girls Girls” which had multiple female characters in various roles, from Hannah (yeah I know angels are genderless but they played into her gender roles or at least that of her vessel) to Rowena and the girls she rescues/Dean nearly hooked up with. All in all this is a very very female-driven chunk of the show, because 10x04 Kate and Tasha, 10x05 duh, 10x06 has a female MotW with the whole madwoman in the attic suppressed feminine aspect thing going on, then that, 10x08 which is in this watch, the Claire episodes… 10x11 brings back Charlie, so 10x12 is the first episode since 10x03 not to strongly focus on female characters, though it has the witch at the end as the motw. Huh. I mean the show is fairly hit and miss with it all, from Robbie to Buckleming levels of treatment of it all, but… Oh lordy that just reminds me I have me first Buckleming (and only?) of this rewatch to get through :P

-

I feel like 12x16 is one of the only episodes to remember JUST how angry Claire was here - her reintroduction is different from Alex’s as much as it’s the same, and I guess now we know all the WS’s intros it might be worth comparing them all. Alex starts out angry but it’s because she’s “feral” and scared. She’s being hunted and being locked up is a trap and just another way to make her vulnerable to the vampires who are focussed on her. Considering 11x12 even just as an exposure of how she’s feeling in general I think it’s clear it haunts her, and she had a whole coming to humanity arc in 9x19, and an ongoing struggle to find her place in the world which she wasn’t raised in.

Claire is immediately shown as familiar to the people at the centre, and routinely shoplifting - she’s IN the human world, but not fitting in, and her rage is frustration, and unending as she’s punching the punching bag in the room all the way through the night. She has unfulfilled frustration with Cas and what he did to her family, and I think even though she gets her closure gradually through this season, it all leaves a mark on her personality because of how she grew up. The world she is familiar with is the bad side of the human world, even before she meets literal monsters, and has only known about Cas and angels and demons - a whole other level of the mythology and one someone brought up religiously might accept to be real without question especially aged 12. Anyway I always thought it suited her in 12x16 to remind us she IS angry and frustrated (and a lot of her problems in 11x12 are her frustration but she doesn’t address her anger as openly as a primary trait even if she’s really grumpy, I think pointing it out directly about how much she’s been through is sort of necessary, seeing her once a year and people who don’t care about her just write it off as teenage angst and hate her for being a “generically angry” teen?).

Obviously Patience is hard to compare since our first real intro to her is the freedom to be at school doing well and being an over achiever and all, and even when that turns out to be a hyper-realistic dream, she wakes up in a comfortable house and her life is clearly full of a very muted tension about her powers and grandma. So yeah not really.. comparable :P

Kaia, though, we don’t see her being dragged in but she’s stuck in the system like Claire is - if she’s not a repeat offender, then she has clearly been going through the process to end up in that shittily run rehab, probably after hospital for the OD and whatever legal processing between buying all the drugs and doing rehab instead of jail time or whatever that would have brought her to that point. Catching her in the middle of it lends an air of defeat because Claire clearly is in and out, prefers out, and bounces back and forth while having her criminal family in town. Her being brought in is fairly routine, while for Kaia she uses that moment as a chance to talk about being systematically trapped - metaphorically because she’s trapped with the Bad Place in her dreams but literally as well of course the set up allows actual exposure to how Native Americans are treated and the system failing them too and for her to discuss it and snark about the state of the country. It’s clear she’s trapped in every conceivable way until Jack opens all the doors for her, and the way Cas comes to free Claire, he tries a respectable route first and then only when that fails he busts her out. Since his appearance and the driving license he still carried around allows him to pass himself off as her literal flesh and blood father so it seems like a lifeline of legitimacy to free Claire from the system… Throw in the white and blonde thing that are 2/3 of the reasons Kaia feels the system will always fail her and no one will help her, and her story is contrasting Claire’s version to make Claire look like she had it easy… :P

-

Not that it’s a competition, they all struggle in their own ways. Patience is the only one who can afford to fight evil because it’s the right thing to do and not because she’s dragged into a garbage life by monsters or angels or systematic oppression… I mean her powers are only just starting, so it’s possible they could drive her around the bend without help (as we’ve seen happen to psychics on this show) but we catch her so early on she’s still in that comfortable place that Claire loses when she’s 12.

-

Anyway I just LOVE that shot of them watching her through the window seething with rage, because she’s SO angry, she’s growling and angry and the “Claire Novak” comment is exactly to make us think OH SHIT Cas did this to her, especially as from 10x07 we know he was looking up Jimmy and therefore on the path to finding out what he’d done… This opening is essentially to show us what’s waiting for him, and display in one very very broken girl the damage he’d done to the family, and the absence of her mother is obvious because she’s clearly got no one else if she’s here, while the absence of her father? Yeeeep. Oops.

-

Here’s Cas to try to apologise for it! More Dabb repeats of things - ways to get us to see stuff happening in cycles but for different reasons or to continue the story starting over from the last save point… Cas repeats the “I am not your father” thing and this time we REALLY get it from Claire’s POV while knowing full well Cas isn’t Jimmy, but we can see it all on her face as she hopes against hope, and Cas dashes it down with the same line as before, tying us back to what he did heartlessly as a newly-vesseled angel years ago. Other lines like Cas saying “I remember everything” or “Hello Claire” start us on the Dean parallel - 7x17 was the start of Cas trying to redeem himself to Dean and this is a MUCH healthier version of trying to fix his mistakes than in 7x17 to Sam and Dean, I have to say.

-

(PS yikes season 10 Cas… It’s actually better he got the tie… His hair and shirt and coat combo are just Not Good this season. It’s like Sam’s bad hair… It’s just part of the general bleh feeling about season 10 :P)

-

I don’t wanna get in deep with old season 10 stuff, but one of the immediate thoughts on Claire’s return was wow would be nice to get a comment on if Jimmy is still there or not and getting Claire’s hopes dashed a second time that she might even TALK to Jimmy is worth it to settle the old fandom argument for once and for all… Cas’s vessel is his own and has been rebuilt for him but without the old occupant to share it. His vessel is 100% organic and ethically sourced.

It’s fascinating because this spirals from Hannah’s own INTERNAL issues with her vessel and yet for all the exploration on that the reveal on Cas is that he’s been alone since season 5, meaning very very little input from Jimmy, if at all, and he’s been “ethical” since his return in 5x01, aka most of his time on the show, but a good way to retroactively deal with the biggest issue. That it’s the Ruby issue too and that it comes through the Hannah stuff has always made me side-eye a lot because this more than anything ties up a ZILLION threads into “wtf are they doing here” with the way it was all told at this point.

Again, long explanation, long time ago, needs a lot of context to make sense that I am not doing the rewatch for. But this is all another facet of bringing Claire back to answer questions and immediately expose so much about how Cas has been for YEARS that there was no “natural” way of bringing up in the unfolding story up to this point. She helps Cas out just like Cas is obviously helping bring Claire in when we look at it from the POV of having her on the show to hopefully spin off and have her as main character of her own thing.

-

Claire’s “yay for him” re: Jimmy being in heaven is so vicious but she has just been like… at least 2-3 levels of re-abandoned by her father in the last 10 seconds. Ouch. And then Cas asks where Amelia is and she reminds us she’s been very, very very abandoned.

-

I still find it incredible how MUCH she looks like she could be Jimmy’s daughter… I know people keep saying it about Jack looking like Cas, but I’ve been so impressed that she doesn’t look wildly un-like the lil girl Claire, but she also looks so MUCH like Cas. We can see the resemblance especially in face-on shots and it makes me feel really protective of her on his behalf >.>

-

Oh yeah, Claire has a tattoo.

-

Cas puts on his tie for the first time since 9x09 - honestly amazed he still has it - and is immediately deeply uncomfortable wearing it. Claire is going to convince him over these 2 episodes it’s more a symbol of him being a dad and that he can wear it for her - for this season it’s a sign of the change she makes on him, as part of the ongoing softening of Cas. I guess symbolically here, he’s just very uncomfortable in this role, but he’s flung himself into it because he knows it’s what Claire needs right now.

Except she doesn’t need a dad - and not Cas with Jimmy’s face - she just needs a ticket out of here. And that includes flattering him that it makes him look more like a dad, and she smiles to herself about that, probably way more confident she’s getting out of here than anything else.

-

I have probably never laughed harder at anything Cas has done than putting on a Jimmy voice for this lady.

-

But she deems him unsuitable for being a father to Claire, which, fair enough, Cas is not particularly fatherly or competent at it. Claire sassing back at her case worker that she HAS to be signed out probably doesn’t help :P There’s a bunch more Cas meta to write about her deciding he’s a liar when he’s not particularly, and genuinely has gotten onto this path to try and help and the realisation that HE has been selfish and hurt people. He  made a promise to Jimmy to help so it’s not just his own feeling better that’s at stake here, either, but the sense of how DEEPLY he wronged the family and that it’s owed.

But he is lying about his profession and why he abandoned Claire and who he is - truths that can ONLY be handled in a different ~court of law~ aka the world that he and the Winchesters move in. Because he is absolutely 100% viably Jimmy Novak right now if you compared his face to his drivers’ licence, or probably even DNA tested him.

And it’s hurt on this level that Claire is dealing with and not the average story of an abandoned child, because she sees this abandonment even when the guy with her father’s face walks back into her life.

-

This woman might not have been doing a GREAT job with raising Claire but she was at least trying? On a human level? The problem is the human level let Claire down about 100 years ago

-

There’s something implicitly horrifying about the way Claire hears something going on in the hall - kind of the sound of a fight or something -  but immediately is out of bed and tensed up, and the fact it then comes for her door. She lets out a long breath with “It’s you!” when Cas comes in, but the implication was that worse things could happen and she’s at the very least lived in absolute horror of them happening to her. Considering the sketchy arrangement she has with that family and how she is basically traded off by the guy at the end, and stats I don’t even want to look up about the system, she’s at the very least *extremely* aware of the danger she’s constantly in, if not at the very least a victim of groping and harassment if she’s been on the streets and in and out of homes and places like this.

It’s another one of those things that basically never comes up especially as Claire gets older and more competent and has a sword from next season onward… She can laugh off the grabby bartender in 12x16 because she’s 20 and it’s basically nothing and she can put up with it for intel, with the knowledge she probably could stab a guy if he took it too far. It’s one of those things, though, where the show is constantly putting kids on busses and leaving them to fend for themselves. Sometimes they get shot a few hours down the road when that happens >.> There was a post about it after 10x12 because they put Tina(?) on a bus at the end of it and she was like… 12… with the mindset and experiences of a bitter 30-something woman. Anyway it’s an extreme example, but Claire doesn’t have a great track record with the people she trusts when she’s younger >.>

Anyways, if the show actually addressed the perils it routinely puts characters in which wouldn’t ever happen in a real world scenario with people being as chill as they are I’d never get done because holy shiiit Claire next episode making BFFs and going to a sketchy caravan in the woods with people who casually offer to kill someone for her.

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I love the ketchup is a vegetable thing, both for more Claire and Dean linking, but the different directions Cas comes at this - concern for Claire getting her vegetables, and using Dean as his guide on humanity… And hey Dean turned out okay, mostly just eating the salad in a good burger and the healthy dollop of ketchup he applied to it, right?

-

*Claire subtly flips Cas off kinda*

It’s interesting how LITTLE she knows Cas to make this judgement about doofiness on him - except for perhaps what she picked up from being possessed by him, as she has so little else to go on except seeing him walk off with Jimmy, and him walk off after telling Dean he doesn’t serve him, only Heaven. Which, yes, very stuck up. She knew Cas at his Most Brainwashed By Heaven aside from when we first meet him in 4x01, where it may not be fresh but at least nothing’s come along to challenge it *this week* :P I would assume that this is more for the sake of getting in character exposition about Cas to make *us* think about how he’s changed, and to point out that on this side of 10x07, when Cas truly has come to loose ends about what to do next with his life, this is the Cas we’re starting over with again.

-

Claire sees their transaction as done - she seems to have stuck around without complaint because free food and Cas helping her has probably seemed inescapable up to this point but as soon as he gives her the option of where next she knows she has to cut and run because the one person she sees as ACTUALLY caring about her needs her now and she’s wasted too much time getting caught shoplifting and needing to be busted out etc. Cas might be at loose ends but she isn’t she thinks. (See above: trusting people)

I do like that she has a mostly civil dinner with him and while calling him a doof, she seems to be assuming she’ll cut and run and bye bye Castiel so is being pretty honest and maybe putting some things to rest with Cas, like this will be their last conversation, at least she can see he’s changed and while she doesn’t want anything else to do with him, it was a nice surprise to get some divine intervention here.

-

Which, obviously, has some mirrors to Cas pulling Dean out of Hell but on a child prison level :P

-

Anyway Claire legs it pretending the creepy guy in the trenchcoat is bothering her

-

I suppose Cas had to stay at the restaurant because Claire made him dine and dash. Maybe he washed dishes.

-

… I’m not suffering through the Burger Date twice in short succession. I think I had some meta point I meant to talk about but it’s not about Claire and I’m sure it’s not urgent but is about the Man Pain™ :P

-

I love that the description of Claire smart and has a big heart, and that she adopted an older boy under her wing - she has that sort of power about her, to make even older kids who respect her start following her around I guess. It never gets sold as him so much as having a crush on her so I have to assume he just looked up to her anger and intelligence and how defensive she could be. Sadly on the other hand it may or may not have been part of an exploit by the dad, but perhaps it was more that the kid didn’t do anything sneaky, his dad just encouraged it and was really indulgent to Claire when she came over to the point she started staying there, so he could use her to steal for him >.>

-

I’m so ridiculously glad she ends up with a good parental figure like Jody :P TFW are a mess but a step up from this, but they’d never be able to give her the stability or emotional energy and they know it.

-

Am I imagining it that the house is the same one as 8x18

Which would be an instant warning that Claire is being exploited and manipulated like Krissy and her gang were.

-

At least by this point in their relationship the wiener hut kid is in on the whole thing with his dad; Claire’s walked into them having been discussing what Claire could do and coming up with the plan. It just needs a nod for Dustin to go collect the gun to give to Claire. Fortunately this means he’s around to be harassed for intel by Cas and reliably tell him where.

The fact it’s a Gas n Sip is especially painful, because obviously Cas has his own deep ties to Gas n Sips, and accidentally acts like the angel of the Gas n Sip here, diving in to stop Claire robbing it. Okay, he’s saving her from herself.

We know from last season that Dean had been arrested for stealing food and sent to Sonny’s, an old school version of “child prison”, and Claire’s been given a much more elaborate backstory that can focus on the human struggles involved with growing up poor and abandoned and functionally orphaned. More parallels between their characters, but this time while it’s understandable that she’d do it to protect her family, Dean never did armed robbery for money, just stole food to survive, as far as we know, and sees something more honourable in hustling money from people who’ll let you sucker them into it. (Sam eventually teaches her credit card fraud so the big banks are the ones who pay for Claire’s expenses.)

Anyway this is a sort of moral point of no return, perhaps, that Cas swoops in and saves Claire from. She might not have hurt anyone but getting herself into this sort of thing is a huge step towards accidentally doing it some day, because jumpy people with guns doing illegal things.

-

You have to admire the spirit of threatening Cas with a gun even if it’s completely pointless though :P I mean she knows he’s an angel and maybe he’s kinda terrifying even with thinking he’s kind of a doof now, but she still goes for it. I’m glad they gave her this whole arc to be angry at Cas and even though they ended up caring for each other a bit better she never became his whole responsibility or he is a check in point for her because after a point (aka, 10x20) he doesn’t owe as much to her anymore, and she’s managed to move on from her original family trauma enough to set her sights on whatever comes next for her… But Cas absolutely did hurt her family, and hurt her, and while it’s not as dramatic as some people were originally hoping that she’d track him down like he was her Azazel (annoyingly, that arc happens over with Cole to Dean and then flops horribly in this same season - I suppose it is a theme of the season because it’s BLATANTLY about terrible parents especially with Rowena off on the other side of things) it’s not exactly far off the mark for the devastation he wrought on her family. The intent, however, was completely different. Thoughtless, rather than destructive, and playing into an inherent problem with angels taking vessels that seems to have only occurred to Cas like, yesterday.

-

Anyway people who don’t see Claire’s distress here as genuine, just whiny, are missing the point by a zillion miles that she’s legitimately upset and facing down the thing that made off with her father, killed him, and is still wearing his face, now trying to play nice and telling her off for armed robbery when she’s just trying to survive, and has been manipulated into this by someone she cares about because they seem to be the only person who cares about her…

The lack of empathy or willingness to understand some people have… Because she might come off as shrill, or they hate teenage girls in general or whatever. Like, fine, don’t like the actress or whatever, but don’t say that Claire’s pointless or her story is badly told in general when you assume her problems are all her being whiny or not listening to the Winchesters who seem to know better or whatever else that doesn’t even start to engage with what is being told here. She even justifies in this why she thinks they are just as bad as Cas, because from her perspective as a 12 year old they didn’t lift a finger to help when he stole her father again, without really understanding the whole situation. Because, you know, 12, terrified, and currently possessed.

-

Skipping ahead between scenes (oops, I’m now certain I had a directly relevant 13x09 parallel to make in the bar scene which I will not now be getting into but I guess Berens did *something* clever, which is my overriding impression of what I wanted to say but like… tell us something new am i right?) we go straight from Claire flouncing off to her getting home and discovering Randy in trouble, and about to get sold out >.>

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Although lol at “Guns blazing? That was your plan?” because Dean’s constantly trying to go out guns blazing and they won’t let him. Feels more and more like a call out about how he wants to go vs the show trying to nudge him away from self destructing on the job, and Berens starts really pushing that… 12x22 especially

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Blah blah blatant threats of sexual violence, blah blah awful men

It’s sort of nice how after this one bloke says “major league daddy issues” it literally never comes up again to characterise her this way

So she gets sold out, anyway, and then as I skip ahead, Rowena sells out the demon who helped her get free, more direct terrible parent references.

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Blah blah blah actual violence against Claire even if nothing suggestive actually happens to her beyond having her face groped since she gets to kick the guy in the nuts, the threat of it all is bad enough, especially as I said we start the episode with her clearly being terrified of people coming into her room at night.

She’s allowed to kick him a good few times before Cas pulls her away from that awful house. She gets a moment to acknowledge that he did sell her out, that she would have been leaving and not coming back regardless of what happened.

And then Dean is left to deal with the clear up, whether they meant him to or not >.>

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I do love that Claire hugs Cas at the end of this, that she’s come to accept that he really did want to help and that since Randy sold her out, they were right about him. I don’t think that’s exactly an indication she should just immediately trust him and let him take over her life and that’s not how the show goes with it - she seems to let him go as far as putting her up in a hotel while they deal with Dean which is fair enough as she has nowhere else to go - but she still wants to be independent and still doesn’t want to resolve things with Cas after this which is still fair game to her not to be EXPECTED to just roll over and let Cas parent her when she doesn’t *want* it even if she might *need* it… She’s left to decide her own fate, and Buckleming roll with the whole “terrible at working out who to trust” thing…

Maybe I should just watch that one with this one and get it over and done with, because all that’s left is Cas not thinking to stop her running into the house and then having to take her out of it again, still holding onto her and protecting her.

Aaaah he’s so good.

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Cas describes Claire as a “wounded animal” and not talking - which is kind of how we saw her in the opening of 10x09 and also how Alex was in 9x19 before she warmed up to Jody.

Sam and Cas exposition what happened in 10x09 to wach other.

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I kind of love the detail that they put Claire up in the same hotel as in 4x01, although it seems a bit less sketchy than it was back then despite being on top of a liquor store and the kind of neighbourhood they add the sound of sirens as exposition :P

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Claire is urgently packing to leave late at night right before Cas gets there so I have to assume she fell asleep or was watching TV and belatedly realised Cas said he’d be back around this time and didn’t count on the fact he’s uncomfortably punctual or something

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She’s already crying basically as soon as they start talking. :( Between the loss she just took and Cas as a reminder of the old one he’s literally the last face she wants to see and now she’s had some time to process it all, i.e. a day in a hotel with no one around, she’s back into flight or fight and just wants to be AWAY from him, at no thought of her own personal safety or where next, and resisting his attempts to help.

-

> CASTIEL  
> Claire, that’s not true. I’m in large part responsible for the way your life has unfolded. I… I have a responsibility to help you.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> No, you don’t.
> 
> CASTIEL  
> Claire. You have seen things, you’ve been through things that no one your age should have. And you are adrift. I wanna – I wanna help you have a life.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> I have a life. I’m good with it. If what you mean is a normal life, well. That ship has sailed.
> 
> CASTIEL  
> Doesn’t have to be the case. You’re still young.

Hey, being a hunter isn’t a normal life, but it’s one she can make for herself :D I think at this point she just means that she’s only learned to be a criminal and has no education or anything to fall back on (waaah at her doing her normal homework not weird hunter homework in 4x20) but she’s happy to keep on just surviving; Cas can’t just move into the old Novak house and start making her packed lunches to take to school, and she doesn’t want him to even if he COULD offer her this life.

But yeah, Claire’s sense of being completely displaced in the world is one of the things which leads her to becoming a hunter, because it’s a way of life that doesn’t demand she has to be anything she isn’t already, and utilises any street smarts she already learned, and she can drop off the grid to do it. At this point the focus is more on her chance to be a regular kid - she’s turning 18 soon which is adult as far as the world is concerned she’d be dealing with without getting back on the system.

The compromise of sending her to Jody to whatever path her future takes - since Jody knows how to reconcile someone back into society who has a similar story because of Alex, seems sort of obvious at this point, although maybe not to Cas, who after all doesn’t know her.

-

And then Claire breaks down mid-sentence while saying this:

> CLAIRE  
> Stop talking to me like you’re my father. You killed my father.

Aaargh, I just wanna shove Grumpy Cat at her and for them to be happy already :P I mean like yeah he can’t really take over being her father in this situation, but at least she can accept that he’ll be there to help her if she needs it…

-

… the message about everyone being a bit monstrous and so what Dean did is forgivable is a bit weirder :P This is one of those things where it’s like… Okay… So that happened… and you’re not really sure if this is thematically or character appropriate except that duh Cas still loves Dean, but he literally knows Dean is in the thrall of dark magic right now and doesn’t go around killing people, and it’s not part of his normal behaviour, and Dean’s desperate to not be like this as well. I’m still not entirely sure about this whole subplot with Claire randomly deciding to kill Dean and then getting an attack of conscience and then deciding everyone can be a bit terrible is at all applicable. I suppose you could box this under lies parents tell kids but Cas is usually extremely literal and doesn’t sugarcoat things, so just explaining what’s wrong with Dean makes way more sense, and there’d be better ways to make Claire feel better about him >.> I mean he’s learned a little about white lies but telling the truth is a much better defence of Dean in this case.

-

Oh well at least I’m only skimming through this episode for her parts, which doesn’t make those parts much better but at least that’s ALL the nonsense I’m watching even if they are the most nonsense-y of it :P

-

I keep thinking there was something I was going to do before I got back to watching and it keeps turning out to be “not watching this”

-

Claire continues laying out exposition, but at least she does the explanation of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd dad thing which used in the recap for 10x20 is hilarious

-

She also doesn’t seem to see aaaanything weird in these older kids inviting her to come hang with them because even as a mascot she’s not like, worth killing over, and is so caught up in the typical blah blah terrible things happen to people who get close to me woe that she doesn’t stop to wonder if this was calculated. I mean in the dialogue this makes no sense but the girl acting “Brit” seems to make it a little skeevy, perhaps noticing and assuming there’s something off about them asking her to do that. No context cues are given by the story that they were anything other than 100% earnest in helping Claire to the point of killing for her so at this point I’m just gonna have to go off of what’s implied by anything other than the directing, and common sense :P

…

Claire sure gets flustered by these lines though:

> BRIT  
> Hon. You seem real sweet, but sweetness don’t clean up messes.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> Yeah.

… we can probably assume they weren’t just inviting Claire back to join their family for harmless poly fun but that they wanted something totally sketchy with her, but Brit’s leading the “seduction” and it seems to be working on Claire and honestly is this going to turn out to be a secret clue that was there all along that a few of us commented on but no one made a big deal out of (because this is super weird) at the time, but come WS they’re going to reveal Claire is kinda gay? :P Because lol. Not complaining. In context it could easily just be “wise older girl leads the kidnapping because making the older dude do it is DEFINITELY creepy and would send up alarm bells that interest from a woman wouldn’t do”…

I can’t help thinking if Claire’s shown to be that panicked in the open of 10x09 and then nearly assaulted at the end of it, she’d be giving sketchy people a muuuch wider berth, but oh well. Here we are.

-

> CASTIEL  
> I thought there would be a connection. One extremely messed up human to another, you could explain why you murdered her only friend.

I swear Cas has mis-used “friend” once already in the previous episode, and they were using “friend” about Dean in the scene with him and Claire… Maybe Cas is busy filing everyone into “friend” right now regardless of stated family connections or whatever. Would explain a lot :P

-

I’m not sure what else we learn in this scene except that Cas hasn’t thought this through and it only works because Claire wanted to murder Dean and Dean’s just like what the fuck she probably won’t say yes so I won’t have to do anything but I can make Cas happy by trying :P

-

Brit continues to eye up Claire in theee most sketchy way.

I like Claire’s yellow phone case… It looks a lot like the case I had on my old tablet.

-

> CLAIRE  
> He didn’t even know him. Or the others. And he gutted them. And I saw him standing there, soaked in blood. Looking like he enjoyed it. And now he wants to meet. And talk.

This isn’t actually what Claire saw - Dean wasn’t even standing, and he was OUT of it. She barely got a glimpse before she hid her face. It’s a lil bit of panic talking, turning things much worse than they were in her imagination. I don’t think the fact she’s wrong about this helps when Cas literally lied to her and justified Dean’s actions instead of explaining what the Mark of Cain is or something nerdy.

Uuugh, I’m glad Dabb and Robbie handled 2/3rds of Claire in this season, anyway. Because it could be proving an interesting point about stories here, and perspective and how we all have our own, and Claire’s view of Dean is ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED but she’s being framed now as a problem and mitigating what Dean did instead of the psychological exploration of his actions he AND Claire deserve in the wake of 10x09 and that it would have been a set up for a much greater episode for had the writing explored this all better.

At a pinch, I’d suggests using 10x17’s plot now, but Dean ends up stuck with Claire for most of the episode against both their desire or something.

Also, Dabb just literally re-uses this episode’s premise for 10x17 in order to get the Metatron stuff right.

-

I think if I had to ascribe motives to these guys and their suggestion, it’s clear people are constantly calling Claire and worrying about her - she’s a dumb teen and they’re assuming she’s lying about like… most of the severity of her situation. If Dean n Cas are that on her case she’s probably run away from home, PROBABLY from an abusive family that would be nervous of getting the police involved anyway, and they DO seem to be drunk here, but none of it all totally adds up to instantly deciding to murder someone for a teen they just met without some ulterior motive - rather this is a thing that might add Claire to their group for life and have her as their manipulated and desperate accomplice, and once again take advantage of the same stuff Randy did about having a teen on hand, if not anything more sinister like giving her a car full of drugs to run or something.

-

> CLAIRE  
> Maybe it’s only fair to hear your side of it. I mean, Castiel seemed to trust you. A lot.

Ehehe I love Claire’s delivery there… I added a full stop after “trust you” because this was definitely a stop, pause, add emphasis about how suspiciously much Cas trusted him… She’s barely seen them interact and she Knows. Or at least, sees there’s SOMETHING special Cas feels about Dean to still trust and defend him after all the murder…

-

*the creepy people smile at her and at each other as she makes the call*

-

They’re IN a campsite with PEOPLE around everywhere. They aren’t really going to KILL HIM in PUBLIC

what the heeeeell is this

-

Oh well, first outing for that shirt and jacket, which are a nice new look for Dean.

-

At least in this bizarre set up we have Claire reconsider wanting to murder Dean before anything bad actually happens to him - she breaks before any harm at all happens. And Dean managed to overcome the murdery urge and destroys a public bench after Claire screams “No!” and basically manages to resist so that he doesn’t hurt anyone else in front of Cas’s weird new child he’s attempting to adopt.

Having now been reassured literally eeeeveryone is a terrible choice of parental figure aside from Cas, she at least seems to feel bad that Dean came on Cas’s behalf and Cas has been asking after her and Dean DIDN’T murder those guys or whatever, so she begins to hardcore long to talk to Cas and get some sort of resolution out of this whole bizarre thing.

-

*Claire does a doubletake on recognising the car and seeing who’s driving it*

-

Cas helpfully gives us the longing retcon, which ruined my life.

-

Claire parrots back the ridiculous line about everyone having a bit of monster in them, but then also makes Cas go away while starting to cry to someone else can give her a lift (whhhyyyyy are you hitchhiking after these last 3 days oh my gooooddddd), says she may call him if she needs him, and takes us back to 10x09 when she was pretending to like him so she could escape, by telling him that “not that he cares” (aka I do and I’m pretending neither of us do) he looks better with a tie, aka actually accepting she likes Cas, and accidentally setting him on the path to wearing a tie again instead of letting us enjoy his undone top button

the good news is because of this I was staring at a pic of Cas from 13x06 I saw on my dash and noticed he’s absolutely still pulling his tie loose and going around with an undone top button when Claire isn’t there to stop him, and also they get a really really really amazing episode out of 10x20, and also also then Claire goes off with Jody and gets integrated into the Wayward Sisters story and now in like 16 days she’s getting to be in the backdoor pilot to a hopeful spin off so yaaaay.

And I don’t thiiink I have any more Buckleming episodes on my list \o/

*Cas drives off looking at her in the mirror worrying about if it is okay to leave children on the side of the road but she seems to know best*

… I mean she survives 10 whole episodes in the wilderness until someone invokes her emergency contact and gets Cas back on her case :P


	13. 10x20 BRING YOUR DAUGHTER TO WORK DAY

Hey… remember when this happened?

-

Honestly if I was gonna rewatch season 10 with no strings attached e.g. friend who has this bizarre idea I skip episodes with her because she hates in media res and somehow thought My Heart Will Go On was a set up that would have happened over the course of one episode she missed and I was defrauding her of the Ellen Comes Back And Marries Bobby episode, I would move this episode back about 5 places in the order. Get in before the plot escalates and importantly before 10x17 when Sam n Cas have their fun adventure. Most importantly, so that Sam doesn’t have Rowena currently chained up in a sketchy warehouse behind the scenes while they just kick back and do this.

Because this episode has a perfect lack of context, except that it’s before Dean loses the Mark, and after Claire walks off in 10x10, I think making this roughly 10x16 or 10x15 would be a much better place for it in the order, fitting in amongst the other MotW. And leaving Claire off their radar for a much shorter amount of time… Honestly, try it next time you watch through season 10. Tell me how it goes :P

-

For this recap, they really smash up our Jimmy feels, followed by Claire feels, reminding us of how she lost her father when Cas walked off with him and an “I am not your father”, then we get into her 1st dad, 2nd dad, wants to be my 3rd dad thing - and how ridiculously it ends up being her “first dad” has Cas on screen getting blown up (in 5x22 which is WRONG he died in 4x22 but there’s no on-screen footage but RECAPS ARE NOT CANON AND ARE FALLIBLE IN WHAT THEY IMPLY TO USE THEM AS LORE SO AARGH AT PEOPLE WHO USE THIS AS PROOF) and then Dean is the camera’s focus in the Murder Rampage of 10x09 even though Randy is dead in front of him, it’s not where your eyes go… So Dean n Cas are *already* because of getting them killed, connected to her first two dead fathers. Now they’re gonna step up and parent the fuck out of her as an apology.

I am literally incapable of watching this episode out of Destiel context, btw.

Remember how before Jack was actually around and we saw how it shook out, peeps were worried Sam n Dean would be his fathers and it would be suggestive that they were married? Literally nothing like that dynamic shook out and it is extremely clear on screen in the dialogue how they relate to Jack and via Cas as his “true” father and so on. So in retrospect, 10x20 has just got 100% more suggestively Destiel in the framing with THAT to compare to. It’s absolutely inescapable about how they were paired with Claire…

Sheeeesh. Still not over this, Robbie.

-

Jimmy’s hair pretty much exists to make Cas’s season 10 hair look exciting in comparison.

-

This is suuuch a creepy opening, because “Jimmy” really has no idea anything is wrong with Amelia, but with the tilting camera, the way he ignores her distress and keeps acting sweet… Brrr.

I was literally just messing around in the cold open of 4x20 to gif it and the way it opens is uncomfortably similar - a perfect tranquil dream ruined by the interruption of something with Jimmy’s face (which isn’t really a “detail” in 4x20 yet but will immediately become apparent on the other side of the title card) and then darkness and waking up, complete with Dean and Amelia waking up upside down.

I don’t really… ~Dean and Cas are soulmates~ because YIKES the system is corrupt. But it’s a lovely parallel nonetheless and this is Robbie and 4x20 is where Amelia and Claire originate so I’m not exactly wading out into deep waters to fish for a parallel here.

-

Claire kinda flirt-bribes her way past the bartender.

-

The Novaks had a small dog and I don’t know what to do with this information. It’s probably relevant in the grand bizarre pattern about dogs in this show, especially as this is Robbie and in 11x20 he confirmed the dog = god theory for me…

… Maybe nothing

-

Claire pushes for info about her mom, with the good old “mom’s on a hunting trip and hasn’t been back in a few days” motive… Again, maaaybe a precursor to having Mary back (and then having to deal with this :P), maybe just a sort of thing that is looping around the themes, that she’s got her lil leather jacket and her fuck you look in her eyes, and is a mini Dean running around. But without a sibling to help

She still manages to push this loser into blurting her mum’s full name, so Claire knows that he knew her and the diary was true.

Which, of course, going off just her mum’s diary is *exactly* how the first season of SPN goes. I doubt she fought any monsters in the mean time. Her life has been very focussed on her personal problems and human evil so far. It’s this episode where she basically sees the Winchesters in action doing their job dealing with the supernatural part that was *previously* out her depth, bring her in on it, teach her the basics, and we have a lil hunter in training, who conveniently did her season 1 arc already mostly off-screen and can now focus on the found family and who am i angst the rest of them are up to :P

-

At least this douchebag phoned the emergency services and didn’t just leave her in the rainy alley unconscious for more than hopefully a few minutes.

-

I love the way the music plays to announce Sam and Dean arriving. Hi! This is a whimsical break in the drama, we’re the back up to your angst!

Cas has a sign that says “this is a smoke free environment” behind him and Dean asks “should I even be here?” clearly worried about all the Mark of Cain related issues - he may not be a demon RIGHT now but… demon-related issues…

Cas sounds rather more convincing in this when he tells Dean he and Claire were both troubled teens. I swear something about Buckleming just drains the vitality out of them all when it comes to their performance, with increasing lack of return - 10x21 is the first time I ever really clocked Jensen *not* giving an enthusiastic go at things, but in hindsight there’s characterisation tells that go back to season 9 at least. Knowing they’re in a Robbie script genuinely seems to raise the conviction and energy, for a similar exchange.

-

Lol at Cas literally waiting for back up, I forgot he said that. He’s terrified of Claire, and Sam and Dean are so much better at this “talking to people” thing that he hates so much.

-

Claire says that putting Cas on her phone was a mistake, even though she already was the one who filed him as an emergency number.

She WANTS a guardian angel to watch over her, in a way - the idea is novel and he HAS offered to help her… I can see the compulsion to do it which when it actually comes due and he shows up to help - nope, he’s still Castiel the monster that stole her father and that she has barely reconciled with and hates that he’s still just *there* reminding her of what she lost.

(I think it’s very nice they reconcile but also this is something so terrible that long-term she and Cas are just friend incompatible, even if she can feel at peace with him as a person while ignoring his face… The events of the episode DEFINITELY help, anyway)

-

Cas and Dean making silent eye contact as Dean prompts Cas to continue trying to talk to her :’)

-

Sam has had like 0 contact with Claire until this point but manages to do his Big Gentle Moose thing to get her to talk.

Claire does that thing again where she says the exact opposite of what’s freakin obvious she means: she wants to find Amelia and tell her she “ruined her life” - which is similar in backwards talk as telling Cas that he probably doesn’t care but he looks better with a tie or whatever it was - talking backwards to say what she means to mask her investment. Self-made obvious lies which are clearly getting her through. I don’t know how many have carried her this far but I’m guessing a lot of her confidence is just telling herself she can do all the things she’s done. She’s very brave.

Kinda breaks my heart.

She does this a lot with emotional stuff - which doesn’t make her a Dean parallel at allllll

-

The idea she just wants to tell off her mom is so tragic, but on the other hand people think this sort of thing re: Mary a lot - that Sam and Dean should take her for task rather than being sympathetic. The fact that 12x22 resolved so “easily” without them hashing out all their family drama instead of grateful for being all back together without it being weird is… idk. Makes me itchy inside.

-

God, the idea of Claire going to rescue Kaia from the hospital for whatever reason in 13x10 when she’s stuck here and has to escape on her own - this vast sense of loneliness that she doesn’t have support here… I like the parallel as well that seems kinda funny about her being Bobby fetching Dean when he had his broken leg in 7x03, but I’m assuming it will all be kind of its own thing and a mash up - I’m just *assuming* it’s the same hospital as 7x03 since it’s the local one to them.

(Which will be so funny if it IS the Dr Monsterface hospital and it’s just a location in WS where they go any time they get busted up too much… Will Jody comment about the likelihood of leviathan doctors? Probably not but I can dream.)

-

Claire tells them everything about the story so far, I’m not sure why if she’s planning to run, but perhaps she thought there was an outside chance that they’d all just immediately say they’d help, instead of regrouping to the hall to discuss - which might mean a high chance of them saying things they don’t want her to hear, e.g. why they can’t help her or they can but she has to go sit tight somewhere.

In any case, it makes her very easy to find but does mean they can at least start investigating despite the fact she ran off.

There’s enough character stuff mixed in with the exposition dump that it isn’t a huge burden

-

I love every time Cas swears. “Damn it” seems especially appropriate for an angel to use.

-

Dean tries to talk to Cas about what next with Claire - he hits the basic points why it’s a not-great idea:

> DEAN  
> Hey, Cas, listen, what you’re doing for Claire and helping her find her mom… It’s good. It’s a good thing.
> 
> CASTIEL  
> But?
> 
> DEAN  
> Well, where does it end? I’m not trying to be a dick, but truth is, you’re not her dad. In fact, you’re not anything to her expect a-a constant reminder of someone that’s gone.

But then he starts WILDLY PROJECTING onto her situation as the lil lone hunter trying to find her mom, with no other family to answer to, and considering Dean’s situation with the Mark and the looooooming darkness inside him (and the Darkness inside him which hates her brother and has been alone forever) this in some ways just takes us back to like, demon!Dean mindset about it all, the reminder that Dean’s fundamentally broken with the Mark…

> DEAN  
> Look, I’m just saying,she’s been surviving on her own for quite a while now, and … and then partly because she doesn’t have anybody to answer to. You know, there’s… There’s nobody holding her back.
> 
> CASTIEL  
> We just found her in a hospital. You telling me that she’d be better off on her own?
> 
> DEAN  
> I’m saying she might be stronger on her own.

…

I really really hope Cas mentally called bullshit on that and didn’t take Dean’s advice to heart. It’s one of those things which is halfway true but as soon as Dean takes it personal it gets to the wrong conclusion. The RIGHT conclusion is why I am even typing all this in the first place, aka Claire needs to go somewhere she can thrive and make her own path :D

-

> SAM  
> You know, this is good. I was impressed. How did you get the information that…
> 
> (Claire tosses a book to Sam)
> 
> CLAIRE  
> It’s mostly empty promises and regret, but… There were enough breadcrumbs to get me here.
> 
> SAM  
> How did you get your mom’s diary?
> 
> CLAIRE  
> The motel manager sent mom’s stuff to her last known address after she disappeared.

*blatant John’s journal parallels are blatant* Again, same as 10x09, stripping away the monsters and hunter mythology and the work John did on the side while on his revenge quest, and telling it as a purely human story makes it utterly tragic, and far more blatant.

-

> SAM  
> Never got the chance to find out. My mom died when I was a baby.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> I’m … I’m sorry. I didn’t …
> 
> SAM  
> Oh, no, it’s okay. I-I got to know her later in life. And, yeah, I suppose we got along okay.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> What?
> 
> SAM  
> In this line of work, death isn’t always good-bye.

AHAHAHAHA FUCK OFF ROBBIE THOMPSON

-

There’s a pretty tragic commentary on how he met her like, once and a half, and he thinks that’s enough to get to know her about if they’d get along, even though they had like, a couple of conversations where she even knew who he was to her. And only one where she truly felt it because she had already had him but that’s the half point from when she was a ghost :P

-

> CLAIRE  
> You guys are credit card scammers, too?
> 
> SAM  
> Yeah. Hunting monsters doesn’t exactly pay the bills.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> Then why do you do it?
> 
> SAM  
> To help people, make a difference.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> That’s it?
> 
> SAM  
> That’s not enough?

I love that they all get to influence her on the way to becoming a hunter :D Dean gets the longer practical demonstration and Cas is… Cas. But cool uncle Sam helps too! Let’s learn to do credit card fraud and have a brief philosophical discussion on the nature of hunting.

Claire’s still so young and inexperienced about what they’re actually doing - what they’re up against - that this “Bring your daughter to work day” concept actually works in context, because it really is a sort of career day for her. She has no previous concept of being a hunter, and in her encounters with Sam and Dean previously no real idea what they do except they were around doing stuff when all the bad stuff happened, and claiming they wanted to help. But now their worlds are crossing over - Sam who knows the hunter way of life like someone almost born into it, can appreciate Claire’s work to track her mum and see how it overlaps with their work tracking monsters and demons.

I do think her story is interesting that it takes personal revenge accomplished for her to turn her eyes to hunting as a career, but the fact that her mom’s diary is stripped down as a parallel of John’s, means that the two are separated for her. One doesn’t get in the way of the other - I think John was an ineffective hunter in many ways when it came to forming bonds and prioritising revenge and the mytharc faaar over working cases. To the point that when he gets his best tip about Azazel he ditches the family business entirely and leaves it to Dean.

Claire gets an almost untainted view of hunting especially through Sam rather than Dean, who is currently about as chewed up and spat out as he gets by it all - that they do it just because it helps people. She doesn’t see revenge stories, she sees Sam and Dean and Cas trying to help - Cas her guardian angel whether she likes it or not, and Sam and Dean messed up by the job but still trying.

And then she goes and meets Jody, who is badass, and hunts as a practicality, as an addition to her job to defend the town.

It really is a much better approach >.>

-

> CASTIEL  
> I got it at the Hot Topical.
> 
> (Sam and Dean raise their eyebrows at each other)
> 
> CLAIRE  
> Right. Um…Thanks, I guess.

(Okay first of all shipper note - Sam definitely looks to Dean like wtf and Dean raises his eyebrows not behind Cas’s back to mock like the both of them are surprised about this from the same place, but to Sam ABOUT Cas which is a comment on him being there when Cas decided this was the best thing to get her and probably whatever drama the two of them went through to reach that decision and yep this is a Thing but I love him so shh :P)

Anyway Claire again playing off her feelings though she’s stunned Cas noticed/knew it was her birthday. Mixed with more of him trying to buy her favour, yes, but she keeps the grumpy cat, and eventually appreciates it… I think in the instant it IS hard to form an emotional response and this is by far the safer one for her when she is a whirl of mixed feelings about what Cas even is to her.

-

> DEAN (turning towards Sam)  
> You wanna get in on this?
> 
> SAM  
> No, I-I should probably stay here and research Holloway.

WISE CHOICE. This is self-preservation of not being stuck with this weirdass family dynamic as much as needing to do the research :P

Also the way to separate him out not for Sam’s sake but for showing that Dean n Cas are the fathers in “bring your daughter to work day” - Dean considerably more in the step father side of things to whatever sort of father Cas is right now… :P

… they use Page and Clapton at the crime scene. Hold me.

-

> DEAN  
> What are the red marks there on the point of entry?

…

> CASTIEL  
> The wound looks like an angel blade, but the point of entry is wider.

Cas mimicking Dean’s phrase about the wound sounds adorably like him trying to use Dean’s terminology while learning how to be a hunter from him while Claire is learning to be a hunter from the both of them.

Best birthday ever. Have a stabbed guy.

-

Cas stopping Claire going to Holloway’s house because “I can’t let anything happen to you”… I’m not sure Claire is entirely used to people who just care about her. Who would be protective of her just for her own sake. She takes it predictably well for someone who is used to doing everything on her own and surviving for herself.

As does Dean :P

I love Dean “what” when Cas tells him he’s not going either.

Dean looks so small when Sam moves in on it and agrees.

-

I love Dean and Claire cooped up together.

I would guess Claire has had beer before - probably the sketchy people from 10x10 at *least* let her have one, if not bartenders in sketchy bars that didn’t ask (and she’d know which ones locally in Pontiac, even if not elsewhere in the country I’d guess) but in any case this also serves as another reflection on Claire being different/raised somewhat right by these guys since Dean and Sam emphatically were not young enough when they had their first beers - I think in some episode or another when talking about an older hunter (Martin? Fred Jones? The guy from 4x04?) they talk about how he gave them their first beers when they hit double digits. Just as an example of the sort of world they were raised in. Now Claire’s on her 18th birthday, aka can drink in the UK so this seems like a normal age to me that especially responsible drinking might be encouraged and learned… But yeah anyway I guess this is America so Claire is now in the window of basically adult but America is weird about it so she has to go to full adulthood before the Winchesters will allow her to drink in their presence, specifically to avoid some of the dangers and tragedy and neglect of their own lives. They can’t do very much to help Claire but they *can* enforce this rule, which is especially good when Dean has obvious alcohol issues, labels himself an alcoholic this season in 10x12 when he’s a kid, and Claire is representative of another generation of hunters.

It seems momentarily awful he’s absconding with Claire to do who knows what (stalk Sam and Cas?) but he is in fact still being a responsible adult and just taking her to the mini golf as something to do while they wait.

-

On the same theme, Cas does indeed call bullshit on Dean’s advice and get a second opinion from someone slightly less messed up right now:

> CASTIEL  
> So do you think she’s better off on her own?
> 
> SAM  
> Cas, she just turned 18.
> 
> CASTIEL  
> You were alone when you left for college at that age, weren’t you?
> 
> SAM  
> Yeah, but that’s different.
> 
> CASTIEL  
> How, Sam?
> 
> SAM  
> Here’s all I know … going it alone, that’s no way to live. You being there for her, even if she thinks she doesn’t want you to be there for her, that’s good for both of you.

Sam doesn’t answer how it’s different, but it’s different because that was just as fucked up and he had to run away from home to go to college, John didn’t see it as a valid life choice, and so Sam rebelled and left with a huge argument that had him feeling basically abandoned by his family until 1x01. He talks instead about the emotional experience instead of quantifying how his adolescence was bad.

The theme of Claire being “alone” is also here because of course they’re going to send her to Jody, and give her a family to support her, and this is the last time we see Claire without a stable support network. The Winchesters (as in, + Cas Winchester) are her support network now, but she’s not letting them in and they aren’t and can’t be there for her all the time with the way their lives currently are. Either because she’ll reject them, Dean’s in no place, or things are just generally incompatible.

Again, Cas isn’t really the answer to what Claire needs long term, though absolutely what she needs now to resolve her emotional issues with him and her family, and he has to be the method by which she finds peace, for his own sake too.

-

look at these Golf Nerds.

Who knew this was what they needed.

That and healthily sassing each other and getting a chance to talk about stuff.

There’s a nice dramatic back and forth between Sam and Cas going into the farm and Dean and Claire playing golf and chilling which seems weirdly at odds, especially when the scene ends up being about the golf nerds and Sam n Cas in the background.

But then gets into the big emotional point of it all - and only in part to explain that they try and help people and to accidentally sell hunting to her - but to explain that Jimmy is one of the reasons the world was saved. And reconciling what they do with what Jimmy did, explaining his sacrifice in a way that works for Claire… That can contextualise who they are and the scale on which her father lost his life.

She smiles and moves away from the deep emotional conversation, but it’s at the last hole - symbolically Claire has reached the end of this particular arc, and moves on to her next bit of the story - helping them crack the case on what they’re hunting and Dean calls her a genius

Which she doesn’t even get because he made the massive insight but it’s all positive reinforcement and teaching her on the job how to be the bestest hunter ever and to do your homework. Dean’s leading by example and since this conversation starts with Claire prodding him about being a hunter, now doesn’t just explain some abstract about helping people, but shows a lot of the process of it too, and shows Claire Dean in a way where no matter what else, he’s the best.

-

I also think that use of the Michael art really was another hint they wanted to circle the mythology back around to him one day, although in season 10 terms, not yet, just that they wanted to remind us he existed :P

-

Whether Dean takes Claire as back up or rebellion at being left behind or what, it’s a bad idea to give her a gun if he thought she was actually going to be involved in the action. And he knows it’s angels. I suppose he was planning to not leave her side so hopefully she’d never have a reason to think to use it, but she doesn’t call him out on it…

-

The noise of Cas not-healing Amelia is so sad. There’s like the effect of his powers bouncing off a wall or something

-

This is such a sad scene, but so necessary for Cas to deal with it, not just for Claire to find out what happened to her family, but for Cas to ever talk to Amelia, to apologise. To see what he did to them.

Amelia says as long as Claire’s alive that’s all that matters and in this story in a meta way it is since she’s being set up as the future of hunting and the show…

-

I suppose Tamiel also shows that as low as Cas went with the stolen grace in an emergency, at least he never prayed on humans in order to sustain himself, and that there really is something worse angels can do :P

-

Mind you Dean is going in there with a gun too instead of an angel blade, and what the heck is he talking about shooting an angel will slow them down - I think Cas is the only angel he has shot, and it did not slow him down :P

-

Does he just not have a spare angel blade right now? I suppose Sam n Cas took the impala and Dean and Claire took the void of where the Pimpmobile wasn’t

-

Waaaaaaaah Claire reunited with her mooooom

Dean and Cas stand back, having shepherded her this far. For a moment it seems like their story is over and these messed up humans might get to reconnect and live their lives as they will, but Amelia has other places to be and Jimmy to see… a corny soulmates ending so that WE are as settled about letting Claire go be with Jody and see it as a new chapter, as anything else. Although there’s so many references through Claire’s episodes of Jimmy being in heaven, that for once it doesn’t feel completely trite, and seeing what’s going on in Heaven is normal enough for this show - and this season :P

-

Lol oops also that gun only had 4 out of however many bullets nice work Dean

he even left Claire alone???

He has the Mark, I suppose he’s doing like… his best for how he is :P

Anyway full credit for Claire shooting him with basically no hesitation and using up every bullet just in case.

-

Oh he even says “angel of the lord” - I suppose there are some very dark 4x01 inverse mirrors, at least to establish he’s a very bad angel with very limited time or exploration of him. For Claire it doesn’t mean a whole lot except I suppose to have an evil Cas to blame and kill on behalf of at least one of her parents since the good Cas isn’t available for vengeance.

-

Aw Amelia :<

-

YAY CAS just full body tackling him because he’s a badass who will protect Claire with everything he has :D

-

This is another one of those cool TFW tag team fights we don’t get enough of

-

I also like that Claire gets to save Cas, which is full circle on how she started and shows conclusively the bond he’s managed to build with her. As well as I guess if there’s an evil Cas to kill at the good one’s benefit, it’s sort of a double good thing.

-

Amelia flopping around all dead while Claire manhandles her and cries is disturbingly real for this show… I really don’t like it but just because it’s really upsetting.

-

real Jimmy has 1 stray strand of hair and a slightly less aggressively combed down look

-

Awww no this reunion is so sad. Jimmy has to accept his wife is dead and only a few years after he died, but that Claire is doing okay… I don’t blame him for crying even if he got his soulmate back >.> Kind of a mixed success there.

-

> CLAIRE  
> So, what? This is some sort of halfway house for wayward girls?
> 
> SAM  
> No. Not at all. Jody Mills is good people, and she’ll give you a place to crash until you get back on your feet. It’s not forever, right?

heeee

although, this line sounds like it’s Claire’s character thing in 13x10 - that she has of course been treating Jody as not forever, though she becomes grateful for having a sense of family and being able to have some stability for the rest of her adolescence and help with the career path she chose in the end. But she feels the pull of the open road and not being tied down or answering to people - too much of a natural leader or at least, alpha personality… 10x09 with her seeming to take an older boy under her wing for example. And not trusting authority figures, needing to make her own life choices after a life of being abandoned and neglected, and Jody only as a positive transitional thing at the end of what was basically 6 years and all her most formative times being completely alone. So when it comes to choosing to stay with the Wayward family and help, “forever” is choosing to stay and be connected to her own TV show and dare to settle down in one place and form bonds and connections that she’s probably never allowed herself, even connecting to Jody and Alex previously, that was always on the assumption she could leave and be free when she wanted, and that she didn’t have to resist kicking and screaming for the last year of it, but she broke away before she even hit 21.

I guess in 12x16 them pointing out how she’s been eating horrible road food (and in 11x12 the focus on Jody’s cooking being real) is another thing to say, you don’t *have* to have this, because staying with Jody offers you a comfort you’ve basically not known for like a decade at this point, and the luxury of actually calling a place home… I suppose also by bringing all the monsters to her as it sounds, to give her a reason to stay and do the Claire thing of pretending she’s just staying for the monsters but she’s really going to stay for the love and support >.>

Anyway there’s the true seed of this put down - with the word “wayward” which even here is a nod to the song even if it’s not “wayward daughters” because that doesn’t work in context, Robbie’s obviously playing with the concept. I think the Wayward Daughters buzz came immediately after this episode, at least with the name, although maybe it was a little earlier… I feel like the Jody thing really sparked it.

Regardless, this is now blatantly the final block in the set up, and we just have to get through a couple of seasons of waiting for the go ahead to start spinning it off, but the concept is all ready and waiting - Jody, Donna, Alex and Claire are all in place.

-

I love that Dean and Cas were having a private conversation until we dropped in on them talking about Claire. Who knows what they were chatting about in the background and also between that comment and going BACK to Sam and Claire :P

-

Dean is such a dork dad. I love his gifts so much. One foot in each world. Stay a balanced human being. (Advice he’s desperately trying to apply to his own life this season as well.)

I love how smart and observant he is that he saw Claire take the sword. And Claire is like I don’t wanna carry a heavy old book!!! and he’s like if you have the sword you have the heavy book.

I LOVE that he tries to judge her for keeping a dorky Cas gift, like he wouldn’t do exactly the same thing :P Claire just shuffles and glares at him, not knowing exactly that she can judge him back for that.

-

> DEAN  
> You already got your revenge. You go down this path …our path… It’s not a long life.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> I don’t know. You seem pretty old.
> 
> DEAN  
> Thanks.

I think that genuinely stumps him because he can’t say but yeah I died when I was like less than 10 years older than you. Have died 100s of times since. Because dude you’re still standing right there :P And in some ways I think Dean doesn’t start thinking of himself as an “old hunter” until this season, and even then it’s a sort of process where it’s not sinking in until the next couple of seasons. It’s pointed out a few times to him this season and he’s setting up Claire as a successor here, but it’s still maybe a process to realise that he’s not just another generation but relative to hunters, aside from the few grizzled old ones that survive, he’s well ahead of the game by having been hunting as *long* as he has.

But he tries to warn her off with safety concerns, and Claire knows what he’s doing, fussing about her, telling her to be *careful* because he did after all give her the book, and let her keep the sword, as his approval that if she’s going to be a hunter, she needs to do her homework but he can’t stop her - he’s not her dad - and he’d rather if she was doing it she knew what she was doing.

-

And then they have a nice moment :D :D Claire apologises and Dean’s like pfft who hasn’t set up their friends to be murdered, and gives her this really fond look and she gets all awkward and looks at Cas and tells Dean to keep an eye on him. And… ouch, it really is better not to watch this RIGHT at the end of the season because that’s literally an episode away from Dean beating the crap out of Cas. :<

-

Anyway Claire doesn’t just admit to Dean she’s concerned about Cas, but then when Cas comes over expecting it to be awkward but still wanting to press on Claire that he’s there for her, she bounces up and hugs him.

-

I’m so glad Cas got that hug.

-

Anyway Claire gets to sit in the taxi and look wistfully into the future, waiting to see what happens to her next, new lease on life… :D

> CAB DRIVER  
> Going home or leaving home?
> 
> CLAIRE  
> Just…going.


	14. 11x07: THE DOUG PROBLEM

I opened 11x12 and was like… it can’t be right there’s nothing between here and there… Anyway ugh I love Donna and all her stuff IN this episode, and I actually kinda like the episode on its own, but in a meta way FOR Donna I do not like this episode because she is just… not a part of the conclusion. It seems like such a ridiculous writing oversight that I genuinely forget she’s not in the room and then I’m rewatching it and I’m like… they didn’t find a way to get Donna involved!??! She just shows up at the end and Dean calls her a hunter now for basically just distracting people for them and watching them do a salt and burn of the rabbit hat??

I’m super glad she’s IN and clearly established as part of the WS landscape and we all know it at least in a meta way because of Briana & Kim being a joint item immediately and forever after of 10x08, and this is just an episode rolling through her life a bit, but in hindsight it’s one of my less favourites along the way because it just spectacularly under-uses her.

This morning I reblogged a hype post about WS where someone was saying Briana was one of the best things in WS - that quote from Pedowitz saying: [“the actress who plays Donna (Briana Buckmaster) is hilarious.”](http://supernaturalwiki.tumblr.com/post/169461184370) and, duh, she is, but that quote only covers Kathryn’s star power and Briana’s addition to the episode as the 2 main pulls. For Briana’s sake - niiiiiice. And I feel like if anyone was under appreciating her before, despite her less than traditional route into being a hunter and less than traditional personality, she’ll be golden now if we get the show :D

So, yeah, the fact we’re going into it with this as Donna’s last time on screen for 2 years is sort of disappointing to me that she should have been in more episodes, and you’d think the rule is if you write an episode with a guest main character, you include them in the dramatic conclusion of the episode in some manner.

It’s just a grinding teeth thing that’s been building especially as we had no Donna in season 12.

-

Side note: oh thank GOD I don’t have to deal with Mark of Cain Dean any more - that’s been like half this entire rewatch since the Wayward project is building up right in the same patch of show >.>

It’s lovely that Dean is now the one like "shh” and warding Sam off with a flicked little finger when Sam says “fat sucker Donna?!”, swapping their roles from 10x08 when Dean was in the bad place and remembered her as being from the spa and not in the professional role they met her. Sam is saying it now but he’s not being controlled so. Whatever. Old wank :P

-

“Killer bunny” is 100% the way to invite them over for tea

-

She’s so HAPPY to see them. WHO IS EVER that happy to see them??

And then she’s all conspiritorial eyebrows with them while telling them about the case. I love it. Now she’s in on the big old secret they’re all in a club where weird giant bunnies are just part of the job.

> DONNA  
> Guy could just have a big melon like my Uncle Wally. But ever since I’ve seen what goes bump in the night… I’m not taking any chances.

The two sides of Donna… hahahahaha

Not everyone needs to be edgy, sometimes they can just be cute and also know your scary secret about monsters.

-

> DEAN  
> Maybe. I’m just still not 100% sure this is our kind of case. But if, uh, you got a wild hare… See what I did there?
> 
> DONNA  
> It’s good to see you two!

Tbh she may just think he’s this much fun if you are in on the “monsters are” real thing rather than thinking anything dramatic changed about Dean :P Anyway I am eating up their interaction and then boooo other Doug shows up. Who is boring even if he’s nice and I hope Donna is free of him :P

-

Dean remembers Doug on Donna’s behalf. You can see him remembering. I love him.

-

AND DONNA TELLING DEAN OFF FOR POINTING OUT DOUG’S CRUSH. Her voice drops and gets all serious instead of cutesy and omg she’s probably secretly the worst to be told off by if you were in say a spin off with Jody and Donna leading your family because Jody is, well, complicated but would tell it to you straight, while making Donna drop the bubbles must feel like the punishment in itself :P

Again, she’s way more complex than *just* bubbly and fun… (Although I feel kinda bad because I keep saying this but then she was among the ones I didn’t give much to do in my Christmas fic because like Alex I just don’t really know what would be up with her as a bad thing?? And everyone was having fun and happy?? I need to write some good Donna fic, basically :P I hope 13x11 will give me tons of stuff and also I get used to writing her speech pattern because woah it’s more intimidating than Benny’s honestly, to an English person.)

-

*scary wabbit is scary*

The long slow pan in towards it as Donna talks about it

the way her voice drops to a whisper to say “terrifying” - I’m sure shit like this is why she’s called out for being particularly hilarious :D

-

*Sam is rather less funny about the rabbit and Donna disappears to take a call*

-

“Two words: Bone. Saw.”

And her FACE while Doug is justifying trying to do all the heavy lifting. God I love her.

(I kinda hate how this bounces back on her that the kid is supernaturally heavy because Donna gets a great wooo girl power pump up speech in here and then it’s all subverted that she gets knocked on her butt trying to lift him and Doug isn’t ever going to know there was something supernatural here… And of course she looks really weird and irrational when she snaps at him “a little help here!!”)

-

But yay for Donna having a sad moment about a kid dying. I mean not yay that a kid died and she’s sad, but I am savouring any moment she gets to have some depth and angst and to start to come to terms with the kind of sad losses and things you see the supernatural cause in this line of work. She knows vampires can get murdery and there’s innocent deaths there, but learning of the vessel problem and the carelessness of curses etc is just… ow. Sometimes people die because they were just an unfortunate puppet to something else’s will.

-

*Donna stares seriously into the fire, expanding her charater depth*

-

She delivers some exposition and fobs off Doug being suspicious and doesn’t come with them to interview the kid, so she’s not exactly shadowing them on this mission… I suppose a sign of trust they’ll tell her what she needs to know, but kinda sad not to see her learning from them how to investigate and ask all the right questions to get a lead on a ghost case >.>

-

All the assholes bitching about WS today are raising the complaint (in a kind of parrot the same nonsense they’ve been saying the whole time way) about the WS not knowing what their shit is about… I don’t think Sam and Dean really understood that ghosts could possess people until it happened. At the very least they needed a refresher on it… Donna has accepted ghosts probably because it’s one of the first things out of anyone’s mouth when confirming these things exist, and on her 2nd case she’s learning something it took years for the Winchesters to encounter. I remember Sam giving one of the first victims they encountered a mouthful of salt, which was horrible for everyone involved, so learning the touch of iron can ward the ghost off is nice too. Shooting them with a salt round, less so for the possessed person >.>

Anyway the ladies are benefiting from Sam and Dean’s knowledge and experience and Jody knows her lore because she never met a vampire until 9x19 despite years killing zombies, gods, etc. Being on the ground floor of the discovery of how to harm leviathan :P I think the wank is completely misunderstanding what the WS are - aka they’re not “replacing” Sam and Dean and they’re not being asked to operate at the same level as them - aka to be super competent hunters who need to be thrown a loop with the introduction of imaginary friends or something to keep the rote MotW formula. OBVIOUSLY youngsters just starting out aren’t going to know that much but Claire’s researching hard and Jody is literally more embedded in hunter culture than the Winchesters, weird isolated heroes as they are, in 12x06 so it’s fair to say she’s at least heard a bunch of stories that might help her out, and if she met Asa, worked a bunch of cases off-screen that never make it to the Winchesters because they’re easy and unchallenging.

Seeing Donna learn to work a regular case for the first time is not making her an idiot for not knowing basic ghost lore - it’s literally saying, she’s new, this is what Sam and Dean can do to help her, and probably if she becomes a hunter she’ll have a lot of work to do, but that’s fine, Patience and Kaia know basically nothing about traditional hunting, and so we have a pretty even split of exposure to and knowledge of monsters. Kaia is probably pretty credible because she has visions and understands the reality of it (in the same time period Patience was denying it) but aside from that she’s got basically nothing. If we’re LUCKY Patience may get hunting advice from Missouri’s brooch or something :P

Idk I mean there’s no point arguing with THEM but I feel I should say an impassioned something somewhere for the people who care and I need to make this rant for ME, that obviously the point is that the series is starting them from scratch and in no way is it making Sam and Dean look incompetent to be rescued by them - for one thing, they need a team of 6 to do what 2 Winchesters do and that’s *fine* at their skill level. For another, they’re all so YOUNG that I don’t think any of them are older than Sam was in 1x01 and their childhoods may have been messed up but not messed up with a drill sergeant hunter father… Their innocence where they have it is not a critical character flaw. And Sam and Dean ended up in the AU needing rescued because of drama they escalated about their personal crap that Jack escalated because of his personal crap and it’s all their usual drama that they have and occasionally need rescuing from and have done basically their entire lives on our screens.

Remember that time Dean spent the night in a scarecrow-infested orchard coming up with a plan while tied to a tree and only didn’t get his skin torn off because Sam showed up in time? Well now they’re *both* tied to a tree and a dinosaur will eat them if someone doesn’t save them :P Sometimes being tied to a tree is just an inevitability.

Blargh. I just… Those people would be bitching if the WS were hyper-competent and included career hunters all, and they’d be bitching if they were all less competent than the actually all different strengths to the team lot that we’ve got. But it seems weird to me I saw this one in particular and the entire thing is rooted in a sort of possessive sense of the boys not wanting them to be written off as old and tired and needing fresh blood and an instinctive dislike of the young pretenders, despite the fact this show has become a legacy thing and to survive it needs a legacy and this is how it is done, if it is to be done at all. And to start things off, some nurturing of the next generation is required >.>

-

Salty and sweet thing - Donna confirmed bisexual and bonding with Dean over it (see this is why they would be great friends :P)

-

> DONNA  
> Poor thing doesn’t deserve to be locked up.
> 
> SAM  
> So let her go. No one saw her face, right?
> 
> DEAN  
> Yeah, he was a drifter, overpowered you, escaped.
> 
> DONNA  
> Well, there’s some female empowerment for ya.

Blargh again, maybe there’s a point to it that Donna is losing credibility as a cop (in 9x13 she’s extremely on top of things in her office and clearly competent when on the job though we don’t actually see her at it - and her enthusiasm and knowledge etc in 10x08 backs that up) and sacrificing it in order to deal with the supernatural as it needs to be dealt with. The weightlifter thinks the thing that attacked him was a guy and the idea “he was a drifter” because this girl happens to be tall and skinny and no one would believe she has this strength as a woman but might as a bloke, would be a great cover for her to go without suspicion, as the description is so inaccurate.

This theme isn’t exactly obviously played into - e.g. they don’t use Doug’s reactions to back it up since he’s got such a crush on Donna he takes her at face value and thinks she’s awesome instead of being critical of her actions. So idk how intentional it really is as something they’re actually selling, but I think that I will analyse it this way: the ghost’s gender being confused allows her to escape unnoticed, and Donna’s technically an empowered female hunter in the sense that she’s learning to be competent against ghosts and things, but her strength is *under-valued* - she can’t lift the possessed guy in the bunny mask because things are not as they seem and they put her at a disadvantage in the eyes of her co-worker. She has to pretend that she was overpowered and a perp escaped in order to allow an innocent to go free, sacrificing her strength and competency again.

(Jody has none of these issues and I feel like the narrative is a little cruel to Donna - as a comedy character things often seem kind of barbed at her and I hope that’s something that changes, because being bubbly in the face of adversity is going to get miserable really quickly if the adversity is always making her look bad >.>)

-

Aaand Donna takes the little boy aside and once again leaves Sam and Dean to do all the talking… It just makes me sad that she isn’t involved and it’s clear this isn’t being written with the clear intent to build up anything for Donna - after watching so many episodes in a row clearly building things up either just to establish Jody better as a regular side character or then to build up Alex & Jody, Jody & Donna, Claire, etc, Donna’s episode here feels really flat for going anywhere with her.

Like now they’re reporting back to her and she’s asking how to deal with a ghost, and we’re getting some basic recap on that, but it’s just… sad. I think we’re missing a lot of potential for her to be around, and connected to the story. She gets to say “Up poop creek without a paddle” which is the only actual character detail in a scene which is otherwise literally just plot and ghost exposition.

-

I mean this is just a sort of run of the mill MotW but there have been some *great* MotW which build up a side character in the same amount of time into something really compelling…

I sound really complainy, but normally I watch this episode through and enjoy it about as well as I can, some grimacing at the ghost concept aside (“Chester”… really…) there’s a lot to laugh about in this episode, both Donna and stuff like Sam having a murder clown get in the elevator with him and having to overcome his fear and fight another super-powered clown monster… I love the whole thing with the rabbit both for how funny it is and how sad it gets and how deep it is… But blaaaaaah this is not an episode about Donna, it’s just an episode Donna is IN. And yay for her helping.

-

Good bits: her raising up the clown mask and making a little light of the killer clown thing expecting some reaction from Doug she doesn’t get (because he’s boring and they’re in different universes and he’s just completely disappointing to her) and then her having to doubled down on the copycats of copycats theory, while getting irrationally angry with Doug, because yay for Donna having a dark vindictive side.

… She doesn’t have supernatural angst, she has Doug angst while dealing with local ghosts and vampires and pishtacos :P

-

And then Sam, who has had no real one on one interaction with Donna so far, and really just knows her story in passing as we learned much more of it through Jody’s eyes, gives this a go:

Sam: What’s the deal? Why don’t you cut the guy a break? I mean, I wouldn’t be buying what you’re selling either.

> DONNA  
> I don’t have time for insubordination.
> 
> SAM  
> Or is it maybe that you’re treating new Doug like old Doug and not even giving him a chance?
> 
> DONNA  
> You know what I think? You need to mind your own beeswax. We have a case to solve.

They’re not close enough for her to appreciate the psychoanalysis, Sam’s a terrible people person, and this kinda goes with Donna telling Dean “screw you” in 10x08 for suggesting she doesn’t come, because I think she gets a looot more crap than she ever lets on. If the Winchesters try to tell her what to do or what she’s thinking, she reacts with mildly worded but sharply meant annoyance at them.

Which, again, I guess if you’re gonna hate on the characters, Donna always being grumpy and far more prickly than her bubbly welcoming exterior gives off is a good reason to be blah blah she’s always mean to the boys, but I love it because outside perspectives and reminders that Sam and Dean aren’t the moral centre of the universe, and the other people in it have inner lives and important complex emotions too.

Especially as Donna’s entire dark drama revolves around Doug1, on her personal scale of awful it might barely register to the Winchesters but it’s like her giving them unsolicited advice on how they’re handling the main mytharc based on scant observations >.>

…

In any case Sam seems so right it’s just the surface text so if there’s anything interesting to say about it it’s whatever else is going on in the scene, like how Sam messed up that interaction and basically drove Donna away.

Considering he struggled to remember her as more than “fat sucker donna” I guess he’s not that great at Donna… Not that Dean seemed much better last episode but I guess he had to get better at it by awkwardness in that episode and Donna passing the test for being cool by killing the vampire and he’s positive to her after that, and joking with her when he shows up… (In this episode Sam snarking the rabbit also goes badly and embarrassingly, to the point where I was collecting all through this part of the season before 11x09 Sam doing bad, embarrassing things and being wrong because I figured he was gonna mess up big time sooner or later and hey what do you know, Rowena tricked him right into rushing off to meet Lucifer…)

Anyway next time they meet I hope THIS experience helped HIM like 10x08 helped DEAN know Donna and they’re on a better footing… Since they’re getting a dedicated episode in 13x11 for her, I’d love to see some better fleshing out of their relationships all round.

-

Beeeecause I typed all THAT while Sam n Dean went to talk to the woman who was hiding stuff and then lo and behold ghost and blah blah blah, where was Donna???

Here she is for the clear up and explanation at the end… Idk, I just think we missed out on a better episode somewhere along the way and it involves whatever reason integrates Donna into the story instead of sending her away for every interview so she has no personal connection, and no reason to be there when they confront the ghost. She didn’t even get to see all her lying pay off, and has to go on trust while probably putting her job on the line some more to explain whatever disturbance report brought the police here (presumably neighbours calling although that isn’t explained - just Donna is here now!) because the Winchesters would never call the cops to deal with a ghost except maybe an anonymous tip for a body that needed to be found for justice reasons or something and that isn’t even what’s happening here…

-

> DONNA  
> I-I don’t know how you two do this, day in, day out. Figuring out who’s possessed, who isn’t. Your life’s one big poop storm, isn’t it?
> 
> DEAN  
> Spoken like a true hunter.
> 
> DONNA  
> Really? Hunter?
> 
> SAM   
> Oh, yeah. I mean, with three cases under your belt, I think you earned it.

I mean, arg, it’s just… she was so barely involved in this case it feels like they’re flattering her for doing some legal running around for them, especially as the 1st case is one they think she blew for them (while drugged up)

I also end up feeling resentful of Sam in this case as he seems very much like he’s humouring that Dean is quick to label her a hunter just becase why not, especially as he relates to her “poop storm” comment and starting to get the hunter life a bit… Sam seems surprised Dean says it and stumbles a moment to agree and then goes overboard describing how Donna TOTALLY deserves that label, almost like he’s talking to a kid >.>

It’s not exactly her call to action to drop everything emotional realisation but in some ways Donna’s been treated as such a shallow comic character that Dean’s comment is I think enough for her to consider herself a hunter; certainly I bet she will just roll up and help perfectly competently in 13x10 though she has shaky experience with monsters because off-screen she and Jody are in contact, canonically from 12x22, and I would hope she’s done a few more cases of local easy things to build up her experience in between.

Of all the WS characters I am actually the most nervous of how they treat her because she’s not been written by the best writers - Snymelo introducing her and writing this episode means 2/3rd of her episodes don’t actually handle her that well and in a way it’s like her own creators don’t really know how much she’s worth, while the director of her first episode did, and intervened to bring her back and help write her first proper episode. There’s something depressingly empty about her life, the deepest details all callbacks to stuff from her first episode, and no real attempt to build her forwards except her weird non-relationship with Doug2, and some comments on her diet and crossfit, and of course that she is now officially considered another hunter.

I mean coming off the back of 10x20 which built Claire up to be a hunter it feels really depressing that this is the writing Donna got here, that the story wasn’t about her in any respect and didn’t even pull her in to be a main part of it - I don’t even care if she would have needed saving but DID hit on the main idea this time around in reverse of her last episode, because that would still be valuing her input more…

I’ve basically got to trust in 13x10, and 13x11 which basically seems to be a Donna episode immediately after to say WOW we know she’s somehow a 4 year old character with NO SUBSTANTIAL DEPTH EXCEPT BRIANA’S INCREDIBLE ACTING and we don’t have any time for her in a 6 person avengers assemble episode (plus Winchesters) so we gotta give her an entire episode after to add more to her life… Which I am ALL FOR but still… THIS episode comes in the post-Alex, post-Claire, Post Jodi-o & Donna part of the show, where the idea for a spin off and them being involved is pretty clear and nooo one is arguing who the principle characters would be, that Donna is a done deal with Jody, and then we’re gonna get 11x12 which is BEAUTIFUL, and that leaves Donna with a miserably luke-warm “welcome to the life I guess” which seems almost like a patronising joke.

Donna deserves better. >.>


	15. 11x12: ALEX AND CLAIRE BONDING TIME

I’m just gonna leap in because my preamble rambling was often about explaining the state of the Wayward project as it was totally *not* known way back when, but by this point it’s extremely clear the show wants to do something with these characters, and this is the point in the season where we drop by for some good old character development and exploration of the concept.

I may be wrong but I think this is the first time we see this version of Jody’s house, and we haven’t seen where she lives previously since 5x15, which makes sense given her role in all the past episodes, so I will say that much like a kid moving out of the parent’s basement, Jody getting her own home is a sign of independence and striking her own way in the world that obviously goes utterly unremarked on in the text because why would that be normal to comment on in what world :P

-

Recapping all the Alex and Claire angst.

And some Cas in the recap which reeeally hurts because he’s Casifered right now, but does briefly remind us that Dean n Cas both put in a lot of parenting work on her last season :P

-

Ugh Claaaire I wanna root for you but the second hand embarrassment is so baaad for you.

She’s braver than I am if she still wants to be a hunter after this :P

I like that in the case where the make outs are genuinely innocent, Nancy wrote us this nice scene with the girl being enthusiastic and none of the creepy tropes about make out spots - I think this show does tend to punish creeps who get eaten which goes riiiight back to Hook Man and that being a plot point, rather than punishing teen sex drive in general (although Hook Man did have some of that too >.> Other make out spot cold opens have been less judgemental). In any case it’s basically a theme of the episode since we go via all the stuff with Alex and her boyfriend and end up with Dean joking about the bumper sticker at the end.

…

Honestly though it just kinda makes me laugh to imagine Claire as the asexual monster hunter who has no time for make out spots because she’s busy hunting monsters, and her apparent total lack of understanding people may just come here to make out and not to eat people :P And, like, no drive to get a boyfriend and assimilate…

But, seriously, she seems to have at least some mild PTSD or serious trauma from everything she went through that she’s channelling directly into imagining monsters are everywhere and being unable to settle… It’s the same thing that I would imagine sets a lot of people hunting - the knowledge monsters are real, the fact they have been harmed by them, and that everyone around them has no clue and is therefore in danger of being hurt just as badly without even being able to protect themselves.

With Jody as your caretaker you should assume your town is fairly safe from monsters and the authorities actually ARE on the case of any that come to town, but there’s still a line I think Jody falls on the wrong side of of assuming too much of this is teenage acting out or something because Claire’s genuinely causing all these problems out of concern that people will get eaten and that there are monsters everywhere, and not because she wants attention or that she just needs to adjust… This is a *new* problem for her caused by similar reasons to why Dean is a hunter - namely, way too much responsibility as a kid, early trauma, and knowledge of monsters isolating her from other people, but she literally was not interested in being a hunter until *after* Amelia died and she was left without any other forward momentum but all this trauma and the burden of knowledge.

There’s a kind of danger the show runs of trivialising very strange things down to their metaphors of things like needing to adjust or teenage rebellion or whatever, or making too much of a point on concluding this by yes, Claire was right it was monsters, and not dealing with all the times she was wrong, except a throwaway comment that Jody would teach her more about hunting at the end.

(In Jody’s defence, I think she wanted to preserve Claire’s innocence and chance at normality, somewhat, and just saw herself as a good potential guardian for that because she would be able to understand/have any honesty whatsoever about monsters existing that Claire wouldn’t have had in the regular system, and the vampires in this episode fuck over everyone, because by making it seem like Alex has adapted and grown into herself entirely because of her own merit and Jody’s help, it turns into a manipulation on the entire family, that has to be a self-confidence knock for Jody as much as Alex, and the over-confidence she’s helped Alex might mean she’s less prepared for Claire than she thinks… Though just to finish this thought despite the fact I’m still paused on the cold open, obviously they all seem to agree they’re stronger than these vampires and their manipulations and build onwards from where they got to, and spite them for taking the time to help lift Alex out of her own depression and trauma and set her on a better path by helping her get engaged in school >.>)

-

I can’t beliiiieve Nancy Won wasted a “get this” on the woodpecker with a weasel riding it

-

Alex walking out the school with all the jocks still looks hilariously goth compared to all of them, even though she’s just wearing a regular black coat and black and white shirt… I guess it’s her pale skin/dark hair combo. There’s still something like, if you took a quick snapshot of her and her boyfriend and said “one of them is a vampire” the choice would seem to be obvious :P

And then her BFF shows up wearing a grey wool coat with pink pastels underneath it.

-

My heeeart as Jody watches Alex and smiles and then Alex gets in babbling about completely normal teenager things and Jody’s like :D :D :D but trying not to show it because she can’t smother Alex so she tries to play it cool.

I love how it’s immediately so clear how much she cares about her and we’re seeing such a normal snapshot of their lives. And that they love the normality of it all. Especially compared to seeing that random glimpse of Sam n Dean, even on a boring “normal” day, are trawling the internet for news of world-ending drama and Dean’s eating food that will kill him young and so on.

-

Alex when she sees the car, immediately panicked and upset about the Winchesters - “why would they be here!?” like something awful is about to happen to rip away all the niceness she has.

TBH she probably has her own trauma about monsters (I mean duh) that Claire is stirring up by constantly talking about monsters, so Alex has probably been stressed and miserable about the possibility of monsters everywhere ever since Claire showed up talking about it and trying to learn to hunt those monsters. I don’t remember this episode having a ton about her shoving her head in the sand - more like she was very aware of her past and how horrible and undeserving it made her feel, but I think perhaps they needed to have it out with Alex’s past for her to be able to come to Claire in a friendly way, as much as on Claire’s side it was obvious she had to realise how much she cared about this family from her end too.

-

I love that Jody has a plaid sofa and a plaid loveseat.

if you read my christmas fic i planted Dean n Cas on that loveseat and didn’t let them move for 2 days

There’s something really spacious about her house which has the litle loveseat/sofa space, and the armchair facing the fire which just suggests - already - that six people can fit in this room without adding any extra furniture. Right now Sam and Dean fill some spaces, but this room is basically ready for all the WS cast :’)

-

Sam helping Jody with shopping… Guys… I struggle.

-

Claire’s hair is less pretty than it was in 10x20, but less messy than in 10x09/10. A sort of in between state… By WS it’s super curly but has a bunch of little braids in it again, underneath… Right now, though, it doesn’t really look like she’s bothering to do anything with it one way or the other, and it’s frizzy enough to be unkempt by TV standards even if anyone IRL had hair like that they’d be totally happy waltzing out the door with whatever treatment the show gave it :P

She flounces off after announcing that Jody doesn’t believe in her monsters and leaves Jody to explain the situation to Sam and Dean, trusting that they might hear her out on it if Jody won’t, and basically saying, welp, your problem, to her.

-

AAAH JODY SNATCHING THE SHOPPING BACK FROM SAM

.. ugh the cut to him eating the chicken. Gross :P I hate watching them eat in this scene but starting with Sam letting food fall out of his mouth? It’s a Dean move around food and it goes to show that Sam only probably looks like he’s more cultured because we see him next to Dean all the time, but he’s still a dude who has eaten pretty much 90% of his life in diners or on the road… :P At this point the Winchesters are both being made to look like the lumbering hunters at the table with the slightly better-mannered women, and it’s an amusing contrast… But really hard to watch :P

-

Ooh yeah Jody’s excuse is “there’s no evidence [the missing people] didn’t skip town on their own!” - this is the same excuse used in the The Chitters as an overt metaphor for the homophobia/heteronormativity of the town. In 12x18 the same excuse is used to cover up the dark secret of the town; both times it’s used to cover shame/dark misdeeds, but here Jody is just covering Claire’s issues, trying to talk her down from the hunt and stop her from rampaging around town menacing people that she thinks are vampires.

Well, I’m breezing through but it really stands out to me, the Chitters example especially as Nancy wrote it and that’s a queercoded metaphor and it’s being applied to Claire’s issues, specifically wanting to be heard and as usual investigation into monsters other people don’t believe in is always about subtext and interrogating perspectives just because there’s something that our main characters know to be true that others don’t, creating a secondary layer of knowledge.

Maybe it’s not so random that Claire interrupts a normal hook up :P

I’m gonna just go with that she’s kinda queercoded in small but interesting ways from the start >.>

Whether it’s because right now she’s a Dean mirror and also this is just the language of the show because it’s inherently a queer narrative (why do you think it’s attracted so many of us to investigate it :P) and WS may or may not deal with things the same way, right now colour  me intrigued.

-

Also Claire is wearing a plaid very like Dean’s black MOC plaid, but just like Alex, she is wearing black and white horizontal stripes. It’s a detail I really like - their sort of sisterhood - waaaaaaaaaaait a minute brb

<https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/169745745633/black-white-horizontal-stripes-for-everyone-o>

okay anyway

-

The ad-libbed wine stealing is AMAZING. I hope we get a ton of fun improv from them all in WS

-

And Jody barely breaking stride when it happens

-

Anyway, we explore some more of Claire’s anxiety to hunt, and though Alex is jabbing at her at first, she’s the one who breaks it off begging them to stop talking about monsters at the dinner table - because this is butting into her own issues. Claire immediately calls her out for having a secret about wanting to go have sex with her boyfriend - again, Claire vs normal teenager sex drive - and supposedly consensual and between established partners, as far as they know right now without the vampire thing. Claire is at the very least non-normative to supposedly average teen behaviour, which Alex is representing, and is seemingly centred around hook ups in parallel to Claire’s drive to hunt…

-

Hehehe Alex’s FACE when Claire calls her out though - I love them… I know one of the complaints against Alex is that she’s wooden - which I totally don’t see because in her main episode she had a huge range because she had to go through all that torment, but in this one just her reactions to Claire are perfect and they have a wonderful dynamic and chemistry, including this reaction shot as I think the pinnacle of their interactions :P I love it.

And Sam and Dean are like … byeeee

*Jody slams her hand down to keep them there*

Time for the Big Mom Speech to stop them killing each other, restore order, and impart wisdom about safe sex all at once…

I love that Jody’s approach is that sex is fine as long as you’re safe. Good, no nonsense, no weirdness about it except a sudden panic that she’s been gifted two lovely teenage girls with basically no time to process what that all means until she’s in the deep end :P

Ehehe and the Winchesters absolutely bemused because they clearly have had like no experience of these sort of healthy talks about things you’re supposed to get from good schools and responsible parents etc. Sheer terror about telling teenage girls what they’re supposed to be doing…

Alex snapping about Claire, “Who’s she going to have sex with, she doesn’t talk to anyone!” which … oh boy. You know I don’t wanna just be like “Claire’s gay!!!” about everything but now I’m on this line of enquiry I just can’t stop wondering if this is a subtle call out to her sexuality, just posing it to us as a question, just as we’ve had Dean’s posed to us in an astounding number of ways over the years…

I need to get off this train before WS because I’m getting waaay too hyped up about this possibility :P

-

*glug glug glug the wine* “potatoes…” *Jody wanders off screen*

this is the most relatable escape from an awkward social situation I’ve ever seen and I love her. I love her unreservedly :P

-

“This is fun”  
“Ahahahahaha”

I love Dean and Claire too. Just capturing a little of that feeling from 10x20 of what they built there, their personal relationship.

And Sam’s just like… bread roll. *NOM*

He made a lot of awkward eyebrows but he was so not into helping Jody out.

-

Wheeeee washing up scene!

Which is now I guess the strongest Mary coming back foreshadowing this season unless someone flagged up anything more ridiculous?

Jody has a plaid wall too, which nearly matches her shirt. What is with it. :P

-

THEY’RE SO COMFY DOING WASHING UP TOGETHER

Jensen just has amazing screen chemistry with everyone, but it’s so clear how much he loves Jody at this point, and this is the turning point for me - well, 11x07 too where he was so happy to see Donna - we get most of the WS build up to date during the Mark of Cain time, but now Dean’s all happy and free, and for the first time he’s really bonding with Jody, because he doesn’t have the Mark, and all things considered (you know, Amara potentially eating him or whatever aside) he’s happy (he doesn’t know about Casifer yet either). I kept on pointing out earlier how Jody had all her big episodes with Sam or Bobby, and how she and Dean had a very uneasy relationship and a lack of comfort with each other.

Though this episode is played in the writing as if Dean hasn’t seen Jody or Claire since we last saw them on screen together (commenting on how they owed her a visit, asking Claire for the Caddyshack review) his behaviour towards them is a world different, because though it’s possibly just a few in show months later, at most, Dean has been through a transformation of sorts. And so if 10x08 was the first episode he was around Jody and it wasn’t completely formal and work-related and she was Sam’s friend first, though they had no personal scenes except her offering her emotional shoulder if he needed it, now Dean is open and friendly towards Jody and this is their first personal alone together scene which actually *means* something - and the fact it’s now 5 seasons since her intro is pretty impressive it took that long, unless you consider she was Sam’s friend first.

No major spoilers, but my next Dean n Cas are in love post about 5x10 is about how Cas is very much “Dean’s angel” in the group as no one else has seriously bonded with him yet, and it’s very much the same thing that the characters often are expected both to have organic chemistry where we see them grow on screen (this sounds like a science textbook now) and to develop and bond off-screen and often to be closer than they were, or the fact that they were met once before, they’re immediately seen as closer friends than they were in the original meeting, on their second. It’s common wank about returning characters being treated like close family when we’ve seen their entire interaction on screen and it’s been feeble in a friendship way to say the least.

Anyways. From this point on I will firmly believe that 12x06 isn’t an anomaly re: dropping on Jody and also I feel like at this point with Claire there, TFW may or may not have been in more regular contact with Jody at least, e.g. after sending Claire to her, texts back and forth about how she was, at least when they weren’t dealing with their own dramas, which of course had to escalate fairly quickly from 10x20 onwards, and there was no break until after 11x03.

So let’s say some time between 11x03 and 11x04, while Dean was crawling the walls trapped in the Bunker avoiding Cas/kinda going out of his way to wander around the Bunker in booty shorts all day hoping Cas would see him (why is this canon.) he was potentially building some small ties with Jody, and from the start of this episode on, after Jody’s “Huh” about not lighting the bat signal, it becomes  more comfortable for them to be drop in whenever friends - now Sam and Dean know there is chicken and potatoes and beans if they come at the right time - and this episode is changing Jody’s relationship to the Winchesters too.

Subtly, but it pays off because the opening of 12x06 with Jody before she gets the phonecall is one of the most beautiful bits of the show and I’m so sorry you’re gonna have to watch it with me next :P

-

ALSO I LOVE JODY TALKING HONESTLY TO DEAN

it’s that same thing of Mary talking honestly instead of saying “I’m fine” for at least the opening of season 12 (I think she started doing it more later when she was working with the BMoL and had Troubles but she was supposed initially to represent the idea of better communication). Jody’s always bugging Dean to open up to her, and I think this is a way of leading by example - casually admitting she’s hanging on by a thread or explaining her problems to him instead of bottling it up. It’s healthy to vent! She truly loves Claire and Alex so it’s not a big dramatic problem, she just has her life too and it’s a bit hectic and terrifying for her!

-

“Sammy and I could have benefited from a little of that”

I weep forever.

-

Because then of course we have the whole thing where Dean tells Mary she and John got together because Led Zeppelin so of course he finally goes and makes Cas a mixtape and whaaat.

-

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah Jody saying she’s not their moms… But in 12x16 she says Jody’s her mom waaaaaaaaaaah

-

Then Jody describes Claire going down the path of an obsessive hunter and skipping school to do it - again, because it’s so much a normal part of their lifestyle, Dean’s like, sounds creepy when you put it like that, instead of like, “Oh yeah her mom just died horribly and she killed the monster that did it, her trauma is going to be all sorts of messed up”

-

And then he decides to send Sam to talk to her because he thinks Sam is better at the feelings and knowing what to say, when really they need to discuss the root of her trauma and reassure her that everyone is safe, or safe enough to let Jody look after the town and Sam and Dean to manage the world while she’s still got a chance at school…

but, nah, this episode will vindicate Claire as a hunter because at heart you have to be a bit messed up to do it, and Claire needs a heroic side - people to save and fight for, and to no longer be a lone wolf, which is the acknowledged character statement for her about WS, and as this show goes over a LOT for Dean, you can’t just kill monsters - it’s *saving people, hunting things* and a balanced, good hunter, has both…

I mean, we WANT her to become a hunter, and this is good because what other sort of help will she get and someone needs to save people, may as well be for these reasons rather than bloody revenge, and these are just the teething problems :P

But I can still critique the underlying structure, since I’m so wildly over-invested in Dean and Sam and how this lifestyle of revenge has utterly messed them up…

-

Claire’s room… She has like, a thing of hair mousse maybe, maybe some nail polish out on the side? Around 15 books visible, and all her research on the wall of visual things - I think she’s still learning signs and symbols, and learning to identify basic things hunters need to know like moon phases and weather patterns that are omens and the like… It’s a good start, and again I am reminded of Asa Fox and his little Opening of Up montage where he was curating a wall as well.

She also has a cute lamp, another one of those chairs with the same plaid and a painting of some horses on the wall. Awwwww.

-

Sam has a good conversation with her to start with, especially being sympathetic and using the skills Dean mentions about him being better at talking - he is for the structured, diplomatic or whatever side of it, but Dean can get people to really open up by getting very, very real with them with empathy. Anyway:

> SAM  
> Right, um, about that. Claire - I know how it can be. The hunter life, consumes you. There is no nine to five, you start seeing monsters at every Quick-Mart in town…
> 
> CLAIRE  
> So you think I’m nuts?
> 
> SAM  
> No! Of course not. What I’m saying is - I’m not sure you have a case. And lately it seems like you’ve spent a lot of time hunting monsters that weren’t there.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> What is that supposed to mean?
> 
> SAM  
> You wouldn’t be the first hunter who is trying to escape something.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> And what am I escaping, exactly, aside from mind-numbing boredom?
> 
> SAM  
> You tell me. And how are things with Jody and Alex? And I’m not - taking sides, I’m just trying to understand what’s going on.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> They’re not trying to make me feel bad. I mean - Alex says she hate me, but, um… Sometimes I just feel like I’m a little late to the Jody and Alex show.
> 
> SAM  
> Yeah. Well they have been through some heavy crap together.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> (Nods.) Maybe it’s time I just head out on my own. And be a full-fledged hunter.
> 
> SAM  
> Claire. I absolutely understand the need to hunt. Believe me. I do. But the monsters are always going to be there. On and on. Forever. But a chance at a family? At a home? School? That won’t be.

It’s a good start to addressing her potential trauma and the reason that she’s got really into it - sad as well that her first truly identifying feature as a hunter is running away and burying feelings. Of course then the conversation gets to being about her current situation and not going back to her PERFECTLY UNDERSTANDABLE DEAD PARENT TRAUMA from like, last year, and instead focuses on how she’s fitting in here, which just leads to Claire deciding that the way she’ll ever get better is to leave, be less bored by being on the road hunting things for real…

(Oh and this shot in the middle of the conversation reveals a chest of drawers stacked with at least 20 more books so she’s up to 45 and that’s a small library :P)

Anyway it’s mapping out what Claire actually does - she gets more emotionally settled and attached to Alex and Jody, but then gets the wanderlust and hits the road, starts hunting alone, 12x16, blah blah, decides for real she’s going to be a hunter and stop pursuing other career options, aaaand that takes us to the WS return we see in the sneak peek

(Also AAAH I am so behind… I started after 13x02 and I still didn’t have enough time!!)

-

I love how Claire is all dressed up when she arrives, complete with complicated braid, and a necklace with a sort of cool silver claw… She’s wearing what  looks like a red henley under all the layers, which I never noticed before but actually is such a Dean statement Dean hasn’t even actually done it, it’s just combining his colours and shirts into one thing :P But it’s his maroon and black.

And his sass :P

-

Shades of 9x15 and “are you going to out me… aaaaaagent??” when she reminds them they’re all fake FBI… Blah blah thematic overlap I have such a bad migraine

-

Anyway Clare gets the bragging but Dean tells her some common sense about how to be a hunter without arousing suspicion, then gets angry with her with the emotional talk which while not getting to her underlying issues at least is angrily honest and shows way too much that he agrees, saying no one likes school, telling her to “act” like she gives a crap even when she doesn’t, how to Dean Winchester your way through life, basically.

(But he DOES care he went back and got a GED. And Claire cares, which betrays Dean caring, by the end of the episode :D)

-

Once again, Alex is wearing a dark red sweater and black coat to match Claire’s colours almost exactly, even if they have different styles (sweater vs hunter henley and plaid) they’re still matching :D

-

I love Claire’s reaction to Dean glaring down Alex’s horrible boyfriend, like, oh yeah, front row entertainment.

-

Meanwhile Sam and Jody investigate together and Dean is still split up from them.

-

OOooh yes that really weird thing where Dean exaggerated seeing teachers making out when we see what he saw and it’s totally boring. I love it as an example that he’s utterly unreliable as a narrator and often creates a layer of drama and exaggerated sexuality around him - confusing reality with porn - but we see it’s a joke and maybe a defence against boredom, who knows. I don’t think he actually “confused” it or thought he saw it, but his imagination worked it up from a few boring old teachers to sexy porn teachers while he was wandering the school? :P

-

Alex has the obligatory flashbacks - I guess we can’t have both girls flashing back to their trauma and hers is both a season older than Claire’s, and more the focus of the episode in the sense the plot is built around her past, though Claire seems to hog the screen more…

I like everything she says here - not recognising herself, her guilt, the sense that she can’t form new relationships without it weighing things down and wanting to warn him even if she can’t explain it, that she doesn’t think she’s good or deserving of the nice things that have happened to her since Jody saved her.

And the horrible boyfriend is so good at her job, faking sympathy and telling her everyone can mess up and she doesn’t have to tell him, which is really horrible especially because this is something she needs to hear which is genuinely comforting in the moment >.> Ugh, poor Alex. Her whole life is manipulated by vampires, because they engineered her entire personality uplift…

Well, let’s say the saintly dead maths teacher did a bunch of the work and the vampires just came along at around the same time, so it doesn’t feel quite so bad. He was also a positive influence on her, academically, and he can be martyred for her to have a sense of wanting to continue along this path rather than feel her entire life was a lie AGAIN and go back to being angry and miserable…

I like Alex. She’s very strong but she also comes across as quiet and reticent even when we see her in this bit where she’s supposedly doing well. She has the most personality around Claire when they’re fighting… Possibly because Claire doesn’t feel to her like something she doesn’t deserve.

-

Claire continues gloating that she was right, and rushing ahead with how she can put on her suit and go be a hunter with them. Jody argues, no, go put on a suit and we’re going to go get you re-enrolled in college. Once again, fighting her enthusiasm to hunt with a stern sense that she needs to conform and do the normal people thing. In this case an entire room of parental figures staring her down about it.

-

As soon as Claire flounces off, Jody mentally takes off the mask of being a mom and rubs her eyes tiredly. Oh Jody :’) You’re trying so hard for these girls… But yeah Claire’s gonna continue to be a headache probably through the entire show if you get one so better grab your pizza and netflix times when you have them… :P

-

I really hope they stop breaking Jody’s legs and arms in WS because she’s been hurt waaay too many times :<

-

I also hope Alex gets some nice vampire free time :<

Also a reversal of the opening, where there really was a vampire in the car with the girl… Much closer to home than Claire thought she might be.

-

*Alex’s depressing backstory rehash*

I love especially the detail of the Momma vampire with an extra with a huge curly strawberry-blonde wig, because that’s a really specific detail you can use to haunt Alex with :P It’s a motif of her past, really - the walk away from the guy getting eaten, the vampires closing in behind her… Her dead expression as she leaves…

This episode is a past coming back to haunt you thing, and they make an example that’s worse than the normal and still very haunting terrible things she’s done, in order to rub it in and make her feel even worse about what she’s done. Since Alex doesn’t have a very conventional hunter backstory at all, it makes sense that she’s actually averse to the idea of monsters and wants to live a normal life and it’s not something that the story is critical of because she’s justifiably traumatised and she’s at the part of her life where all her growth is positive if she wants to do anything - going from “basically feral” through to hopeful about being human and normal, to not fitting in and miserable at school, to potential prom queen and on track to do academic and sports achievements (she does soccer, apparently) makes Patience parallel her in being interested in academic achievement but from the complete opposite direction, that it’s something Alex has clawed to get, while Patience has been working hard but now has to leave it behind to become a hunter as saving lives becomes more important than taking tests, and even just having the visions is distracting from school.

And of course she’s Jody’s success story, that they have been through some deep shit together and have a fairly uncomplicated relationship at this point compared to anyone else - that of the 4 girls, Alex is the one immediately identifiable as Jody’s actual daughter, with Claire a much more complicated second place, not because Jody loves her less, but it’s all dragged out over 3 seasons and only clearly stated in 12x16 by Claire and 13x03 for Jody, and the whole problem of Claire becoming a hunter has been between them, or at least causing issues as Jody tries to wrangle another success out of Claire which was to make her like Alex instead of celebrating that she wants to be a  hunter. As she said to Dean in the kitchen scene she doesn’t really understand Claire’s hunter thing, especially as Jody is essentially firmly locally based and incorporating hunting as a secondary, practical part of her job rather than heading out on the sort of quest-based system the Winchesters work on…

Anyway it all kinda makes Alex look… not boring, but it’s one of those things where the story about her is fairly quiet and while on a personal level there’s a lot to celebrate if she gets into nursing school off-camera and by WS seems to have a job/placement by the time we start, obviously a lot has gone her way and she has done a lot of hard work to get where she is, but it’s not the sort of thing the wider narrative celebrates…

(I really like Alex but sooo many people say she is boring it makes me sad because there’s a lot of empathy for her situation in the story and allowing her to make this path and succeed is such a nice thing to tell - Mel’s just reminded me that 7x22 has the failed attempt to send (Emily?) the alpha vamp’s girl who was not only in a similar situation to Alex but LOOKED like her to Jody, and instead she sold them out and returned to the alpha. The idea that Alex can overcome this conditioning she was raised in, choose to be human, and grow strong and happy in a human way is weirdly revolutionary for this tragic show. It’s a positive message in a huge way…)

-

Oh no and Jody’s look of horror as this guy tells his story - having to confront again the things that Alex used to do. Probably horror on her part as she was utterly sympathetic to her plight in 9x19 but it always hurts to hear - and to see Alex being forced to remember it.

-

And Claire and Jody looking on in horror as the vampire explains his plan to make Alex happy, because she had been so miserable she might have wanted to die and it would have been no loss to her if they came to kill her…

Claire snaps at the vampires in Alex’s defence - I think this is the first nice thing she says about/to her :P

Sometimes you just have to overcome your relationship hurdles by being kidnapped and almost murdered by vampires

-

> HENRY  
> Seriously Al? You were a complete freak! I mean, you were an angry loner, creeping around the school like some kind of trench coat mafia?

Ohh we WERE meant to be comparing her to Cas - I thought so. I mean I had a feeling this was a thing in some of the other stuff about Alex, but yeah… this is the whole depression arc about breaking her down, but she also gets to build herself back up because of the people around her who love her - something which is a muuuch slower process for Cas and of course because it’s more in depth we get to see him lifting himself up too.

-

HAHAHA the jock vampire running his hand through his hair after losing his temper. Acting his butt off for his acting reel.

-

This is one of those OUCH moments:

> BEESOME  
> You are gonna watch everyone you love die.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> Check your intel, you pig! Alex hates me.
> 
> ALEX  
> I’ll help you! Let them go, and I’ll work for you! You know how good I am, I kept a whole nest alive for eight years! And - and, you can feed on me when the hunting goes dry. And it goes dry, I know.

Alex just immediately folding when faced with Claire getting hurt, and being so desperate to save her - Jody by extension of course - she’ll go back to doing the thing that she basically lost her humanity over and hates herself for, is utterly traumatised by… but it’s the only thing she has to bargain with :( :( :(

(Seriously why do people not think Alex is a good character? Is it because she’s female, traumatised, or doesn’t want to be a hunter so automatically boring?)

-

Claire gets bitten a lot :<

-

I love Claire and Jody’s silent communication over the knife they can use to get free

-

Wheee everyone wins the fight! \o/

And hey, the girls did some work to get themselves free but they still needed the distraction of Sam coming in and Dean sneaking up and killing the custodian guy… I mean they’re intentionally not superhuman but I guess the wank about them being incompetent is that they’re always being rescued? Though Jody has a pretty equal tally of saved them and needed to be saved herself, through the years. Claire is always learning but has got in a couple of the big kills :D

-

I love that Dean gives Alex a chance to confront her horrible boyfriend and get closure

-

And Claire kills him for her and tada we’re all friends now :D

-

Wheeeeeee cooking pancakes scene

I also love how they look all at home and casual.

Claire’s been wearing an interesting medallion on and off all episode which looks weirdly like the one Patience has… I hope they didn’t re-use the prop :P

-

> ALEX  
> I’m sorry he hurt you. Both of you.
> 
> JODY  
> Hey! We’re fine. We’re in three whole pieces, more or less, it’s okay.
> 
> ALEX  
> It’s not okay. He almost killed you for what I did.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> For what those vamps did. You were a kid, you had to do whatever they said.
> 
> JODY  
> Alex - you were ready to give up your life for us. That’s goodness. And that’s what’s scary about family. Gives you so much to lose.

I’M FINE.

I love this moment because it goes from Jody reassuring Alex to both of them looking at Claire, who expressed she feels late to the Jody and Alex show, and they all smile nervously at each other, knowing how Claire and Alex fought or offered to sacrifice for each other - that they understood this about each other for a moment, and Claire is now on the threshold of becoming a proper part of this family.

Sam and Dean thankfully arrive before anyone gets too emotional :P

-

I love Claire bouncing excitedly as she tells Dean that Jody is going to teach her to hunt properly and not hunt like a dumb ass - the same message from 10x20 to do her homework and not rush in and to do all her due diligence. Because her enthusiasm is kinda dangerous in the sense that she’s still young, inexperienced, and as much work as she puts in, unprepared. And you can hear her admitting it as she explains that Jody thinks she’ll get herself killed, and she’s had a lesson in how bad it can get - and how vampires can get the drop on you and how much stronger they are than you so you have to be 10x smarter than that…

Also - help with hunting from Jody coming with accepting her as family, that Jody is now building bridges to what Claire clearly needs rather than trying to guide her onto the same path as Alex, which Claire resists every step of the way. Jody understanding that Claire has different needs and a different path ahead of her, and that by not listening to her the vampire thing escalated, and Claire’s instinct is completely un-honed as a hunter but at least it was *right*, and if she knew more she would have narrowed in on the vampires sooner maybe…

At the very least, treating her like an adult who can make her own choices.

-

Sam and Jody bonding over Sam eagerly shovelling all her food into tupperware.

-

And like Dean got to bond with Claire, Sam goes over to talk to Alex, because they do have more of a character connection in the sense that she is more relatable to Sam as a character mirror and Claire is more relatable to Dean in a character mirror - Sam and Dean logged basically NO time with Alex in 9x19 :P

-

Claire follows Sam over and doesn’t let him have the moment as a profound Sam Bonds With Someone moment - like I said, Claire hogging screentime in a main character way, she wants to check on Alex too :’)

Alex says she has a bio quiz on Monday - the same thing Patience says about having to go back to school and act like it’s all normal in 13x03, where it seemed more obviously like denying the life. Alex is also given some conflict about the hunter life and if she wants to stay in a world with Jody where the Winchesters drop by all the time and Claire is bouncing around learning to be a hunter - conflicts which will only become relevant if we get a whole show about them living with Jody and hunting together. It’s very possible that this particular thread is followed less as Alex wanting to leave, as wanting to be normal as they’ve entrenched her in Jody’s life and if the show is static in location but Alex is one of the mains, she can’t ever disappear for long, and constant exposure to monsters and learning to hunt might help her get over this if they need her to be more on the team:

> ALEX  
> I know. And I’ll be ready. And when I get my life together, I might be moving on.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> Alex, you don’t have to leave to protect us.
> 
> ALEX  
> That’s not why. I can’t be around what you all are doing. Things you’re fighting.

But I think this episode is seeding possible conflicts and it’s one of the only statements we have from Alex about how things might go for her in Wayward Sisters, as this is all still very tentative, and even next season when we sort of knew it was coming, very little is built about Alex except that she’s Jody’s close personal family.

So. Open questions about Alex’s fate, but Claire also for WS promo stuff has been advertised about being hesitant to settle down with the family, and Alex is the one who’s comfortably entrenched in Jody’s life, and if BOTH girls are struggling with staying or going… IDK, the show can’t be under constant threat the two leads will just up and go? Perhaps Claire will have a very declarative moment and immediately latch onto the idea of staying once it makes sense, and no more argument, just like she picked hunting as a career, latched onto it, and becomes utterly determined to see this path through once she has chosen it.

(Both Alex and Claire represent this determination, but in two different directions - they’re very similar while having utterly opposite ideas about stuff, hence the massive conflict between them :P)

But yeah, it’s Alex’s core trauma and this episode didn’t resolve it for her (it’s to huge to resolve in one episode, really, and like the Winchesters’ core traumas, should really play a part in her characterisation forever at least in a small part) which means that as this was the last focus on her as a character, we have her left scared of monsters and unable to handle being around too much monster talk, pretty much in direct opposition to Claire, who ONLY wants to talk about monsters now. But they’ve found middle ground as family for now, which is the important thing I suppose :D

-

> JODY  
> Ah, as long as everyone wears a condom, we’ll be fine.
> 
> DEAN  
> I want that bumper sticker.

Best lines to end an episode on ever.

-

*Long shot as the car drives off, leaving Jody and her family to their future in a bright new dawn of the show*

SYMBOLISM


	16. 12x06: YOCKEYNATURAL

And now Mary is back and everything feels different - we’re going backwards from the start. Dean’s new version of “saving people hunting things - this is our life” to Mary, the shots of her face existing in the new world where Mary is a person not an object, Mary as a person in 5x13 fighting against Anna, and the reminder hunters die - using Jo as an example. The crossroads demon with red eyes from 2x08, Bobby’s line about Meg Masters being possessed in 1x22, again about a female character… And then the recap of Mary flowing out of Dean’s mood since she left, and Sam, in the RECAP, offering Dean pie… Dabb era is a treat, guys. I’m glad to be back!

In this case, Asa seems to be the ghost of hunting past, all the typical traits associated with hunters in general, Dean in particular, who needs to be laid to rest in order for the show to evolve beyond this. Mary and Jody are important players in this, and Max and Alicia represent the next generation away from the WS. Jody’s role is obvious, since we’re in revving up to WS mood, and Mary’s is mercurial and she’s still very much in a “who is she” phase, currently dealing with her past, so that she can have a future of her own. There’s a heck of a lot going on here, and Jody’s place in it is important for a lot of reasons - her link to the hunter community fostered outside of Sam n Dean, the fact she is their in to this social situation when they haven’t got these connections of their own. Her position as someone they care about who can get possessed without it being the same high stakes as Mary… And the comparison to Mary and Jody which is NOT competitive for being their mother figure, especially as Jody is the “Mom friend” not literally a mother figure. She’s nurturing and caring but doesn’t have a literal motherly bond to the Winchesters, and is much more like their peer, meaning Mary doesn’t have to be jealous of her, and Jody isn’t judgemental of her - the judgement comes from Asa’s mom, using him as a proxy for Mary’s feelings about what she’s done to her own sons as well.

-

OH add the opening of 12x06 to parallels to The Chitters we’re collecting, as it’s a kid in the woods… even if it’s got no other connection aside from being in the past.

-

I love hunter Mary and her car and jacket… The fact she still has a momsy flowery shirt on underneath. She’s always been associated with blue and white (virgin mary colours) and flowers, and I love that this season keeps a lowkey association going, even while subverting the fuck out of her character.

And in this case, revealing how she continued hunting in the era before double denim was outlawed.

Asa is a scrappy mini!Dean before Dean was more than a few months old, and there’s a progression of Mary interacting with people of various ages, minus teenagers - the babies/toddler in 12x03, lil Asa here, and later helping Alicia and Max in 12x09 (off-screen) as they represent season 1 era hunting Sam and Dean. It’s another little progression and coming to terms, filling in the gaps, etc.

In this case though we go back in time in order to go forwards.

-

Sorry for lingering on Mary btw - she’s not coming under “the man pain™” so it’s hard to resist :P

-

It’s kinda hilarious going from 11x12 > here since Mary has the same hairstyle Claire did in the last scene - she’s talking about retiring and Claire was talking about picking it up. Asa asks who’s going to continue saving people when Mary retires, and Claire is going to be there to do it when Dean and Sam finally hang it up

-

*montage from the start of Up*

-

OH GOD I forgot the Jody stuff started with a lingering shot on a photo of her son before getting to her. Ow ow ow ow ow ambush. AMBUSH.

I was only just recovering from Asa’s sudden death over the title screen :P

So yeah, a story of loss and little boys and their mothers, another episode where Sam and Dean are those “little boys” displaced to Mary… Asa’s mother mourning the future her little boy would have had if he hadn’t been a hunter, etc.

-

Seeing day off Jody is one of the rarest and most beautiful things the show has ever given us :P I think seeing a TV character kicking back in pyjamas in the middle of the day with pizza and wine is wonderful. This is also I think the first episode where Jody is naturally grey.

There’s something so relaxed and comfortable about having her around, and once again we’ve got a story which starts with female characters and their stuff, and Sam and Dean just… drop by. They are *only* here because of Jody, and for Jody once she needs the emotional support. They’re her friends and that’s the beautiful extent of their involvement in this.

-

hehehehee Claire and Alex are off “being angsty at a radiohead concert” this one detail made like my entire month back when

… well no that is a lie, in about 30 seconds my entire year is going to be made.

I am just gonna bite my tongue and skip past it and just make this face

-

uugh I just went on my dash and saw the promo with writer & actor commentary for 13x10 and I’m feeling actually kind of overwhelmed that something that was a little seed when I was new to fandom (hit it up AT 9x19 in fact!) has become this huge ass thing. Kinda want to weep and play Skyrim. I will persist :P

-

Jody gets the phone and the mood plummets in the episode as well, after all the hilarity.

-

Dean swapping the TV to the sports to try and wash away the chick flick thing is hilarious though. Too late, my guy. Asa just died for your toxic masculinity.

-

Dean’s wearing similar plaid to Jody’s trousers.

-

Dean’s eyebrows at the “fox mulder” thing… He’d have had a thing for Asa if he met him

-

Oh Jody don’t cry *tries to hug her through the screen* Kim is SO GOOD at acting this raw grief :(

And how she cries over delivering the hilarious line about telling them to clean up because they’re spending 5 hours in the car… That’s professionalism.

-

MAX AND ALICIA HI GUYS

-

This must have been fun to be an extra on

-

Asa’s mom is a great character too… A bit of a diva, not unlikable but still eccentric. The glasses made me think of Carrie Fisher, who I swear had tinted glasses like that, though of course she can’t match up to THAT level of god tier awesome :P

Jody’s face after talking to her though… Gah, Kim Rhodes is such an asset to this show.

-

“Soooo… this is going to be fun.”

-

I love Jody perched on a chair while listening to more hunter stories - Asa’s mom is all settled into her chair, but Jody is perching on the arm one foot on the chair (for SHAME woman were you raised in a barn??) and it’s sort of like… she’s not totally comfortable in this place, maybe even like, 30% feeling she’s belonging judging on how much chair she’s taking up, even if she was a part of Asa’s life for a while. Bucky’s doing all the talking even though it seems to be something Jody was present before - before she and Asa snuck off :P

-

Sam and Dean catch the end of that, Dean goes in confident to talk about Jody and Asa romantically (even if he finds it weird to share sex stuff with Jody like talking about his porn), and then it ends up being Sam and Jody exchange and Sam uncomfortable as Jody talk about how dating is hard and she’s allowed a life outside of them - then Sam is given a reaction turning down another beer, and generally over-acting and looking weird.

Look. He was smitten in 7x12. Maybe things have moved on, maybe not, but I have to ship ‘em a little even now :P

I love the exchange going on in the background while Randy is getting murdered (understandably hard to parse :P)

> Jody: You shouldn’t be surprised that I’d enjoy the company of a ruggedly hot man.   
> Alicia: Amen to that.   
> [The front door opens and someone steps inside the house]   
> Dean: Hey, you clearly deserve your sweet, sweet time alone.   
> Jody: Well, I mean, it wasn’t always sweet.   
> Dean: Uh… yeah, it’s just not how we think of you. You know, I…   
> Jody: Good, 'cause that would honestly be weird.   
> Dean: Nobody… nobody said you can’t date, right?

Yet more of this weirdness about Jody dating, just because Dean’s bracketed her in as Mom Friend so much harder than Sam has - since Sam was kinda smitten with her as I said.

I guess it’s part of Mary coming back - having to conceptualise Jody as a woman who likes to date, just as much as a mom who likes to hunt.

-

Jody’s reaction to Mary being back from the dead is one of the highlights of the entire show.

> Jody: Mom? Mom. Wait, m– your mom?   
> Sam: Yeah.   
> Jody: I thought– I thought you were…   
> Mary: I was.   
> Jody: [quietly] Wow.   
> W-wow!   
> [Jody hugs Mary excitedly] It is so nice to meet you.   
> Wow!

aaand one final “wow” as she wanders off

-

They really don’t keep her up to date :P

This episode not only shows Jody existing on her own without Winchesters but reminds us how much existing they do without telling her, since the bits with her really drive home she’s a real functioning human with a life outside them.

-

She waits to ambush one of them after they stop talking to Mary, and gets Dean, who is the most messed up about it on the surface, and this time she presses hard that he can talk to her about things:

> Jody: Hey.   
> Dean: Hey.   
> Jody: You okay?   
> Dean: Swell.   
> Jody: Huh. Is that why you spent the entire ride up here telling me in extreme, excruciating detail how you killed Hitler, but, uh, you neglected to mention the fact that your mom is back from the dead?   
> Dean: Yeah, no big deal.   
> Jody: That’s a lie.   
> Dean: Jody…   
> Jody: Look, maybe this isn’t my place, and this is epic stuff, but, you know, if I could have my son and my husband back? I mean really back? I would give anything, absolutely anything to have that. And it would scare the hell out of me.   
> Dean: Yeah?   
> Jody: Yeah. Because what if I’ve changed. What if they changed? What if it just didn’t work out the way I wanted?   
> If you wanna talk about anything, absolutely anything, I’m here.   
> Dean: Thanks, Jody.

Again, she does the thing where she puts herself out there first, and explains exactly how she knows something is up with Dean, going several steps further to making herself vulnerable and clearly sympathetic to Dean than in 10x08 when she was offering advice, and what worked a little in 11x12 to make Dean admit something emotional about, well, wishing he had Mary. Oops. :P

But the fact he doesn’t take the bait, still, makes this a very long ongoing thread that Sam can be more emotionally honest with Jody than Dean can and he seriously resists telling her any of the messed up stuff in his life.

(It was this that made me think that if he DID open up in 13x03 it would be utterly groundbreaking but tbh gave me fairly low hopes about it, as it’s a very established pattern and I think if it ever happens, at this point they’re going to need a considerable subplot for it :P It’s very possible writers want to make Jody open and all without actually using her just for the boys’ emotional labour aka threading the needle between compassionate!Jody and independent and not here just for the Winchesters!Jody and also because she’s the sort of person if you get into it with her you’d probably talk out everything and feel too much better to continue angsting your way through a season :P)

-

It’s also worth remembering that Jody has to clarify “really” back because she had her son back as a zombie and though it’s not clarified in this episode with flashbacks or the recap, she’s fully qualified to sympathise for family coming back WRONG and at the same time the way we meet her is her pretending everything is normal with her son and that ends up with her husband getting eaten, so I think this was a good subtle way to remind up with her backstory just how prepared she would be for this conversation and the ability to bend her mind around the weird loops you have to make in these scenarios.

-

Huh I guess you can tell Jody is possessed at this point because when they all get out their torches she gets out a lighter instead, just like, demons = fire because Hell and everyone else has normal lights.

Side note: does Jody smoke or is this just being a prepared hunter but not prepared enough to have a torch? Because that would be a fun headcanon :P

-

And again we get a lil reaction shot of “Jody” looking up, holding a candle, lit from below with spooky flames, when Mary steps back into the room with the angel blade.

She REALLY ought to have communicated where she was going to someone, which seems like a metaphor for basically the whole season and show :P

-

Heh, but then Jaeldy goes to talk to Sam about her “suspicions” that Mary is possessed, I guess playing off knowing Jody and Sam’s connection???

I am the worst :P

-

But yeah of course Jody begging them to kill Mary is blatantly out of character for pretty much anyone as a sign of them being possessed, but honestly it’s the fact Jody seems to be having a panicky meltdown about it and getting desperate for them to stab Mary in self-defence that’s the most out of character :P Like, Jody doesn’t lose her cool! Who is this!?

“Jody! You don’t sound like yourself!” says Sam, being given the responsibility of identifying that something is wrong with a loved one

-

Jael!Jody is awesome. Got an interview from Mel from waaaaay back saying that she’d want to play an evil version of Jody, and she got her wish.

She’s cute as a button while being evil - the light sources give her these huge pixie eyes and wicked pixie eyebrows to go with her pixie cut hair… I love it :P

-

And then Mary tries to stab Jody with the angel blade because she’s possessed and Sam has to be like NO THAT’S JODY, and Mary is having an extreme “it’s a demon?? we kill them at any cost??” moment, which honestly should have been a bigger sign that her head wasn’t in the game (I mean, that the show made more of it) because she’s literally doing to Jody what Jael was trying to get them to do to Mary - stab first, ask questions later. And it is the path the Winchesters have leaned the long hard way isn’t the right one and that they have to save as many people as possible - Sam especially grapples with the vessel issue, after they got into a very soldier-like mindset when demons were a main enemy on and off for a while, once they settle into being only occasional villains when things are better with Crowley, he has the luxury not to have to treat it like a war with losses and in season 11 starts a clear campaign not to mess this up all the time, including with random demons in random vessels he doesn’t have an attachment to.

So. All good character dynamics going on here :D

I was musing up the top of this one about motherly jealousy, and I guess the one angle I didn’t account for was Mary being somewhat jealous that Sam n Dean had someone like Jody in their lives (although Ellen would be a more obvious target if she was still around) and though they actually do seem to get on, this isn’t even the only time Mary tries to kill Jody this season, which is pretty low odds to happen twice at random :P I don’t think any of this is expressed externally, but analytically, I am very interested that Mary has two goes at Jody in this season, especially as Jody is more of a Mom Friend than a Mom to them, meaning she can offer maternal-style kindness to them but she isn’t actually filling a mom hole in their hearts to such a needy degree as they might have absorbed her if things were more full-blown. Like with Ellen, who caught them when they were younger, and was mom to Jo, who was closer to being their peer, and Ellen was immediately more maternal, while Jody has only ever been a compassionate friend but approached them as a friend and ally who *happens* to be a motherly personality.

(There are better posts about this out there :P)

In any case, it makes it all pretty subtextual and I would reckon it’s more over Dean than Sam because of Jody once again trying to reach out to Dean while having a different relationship with Sam (the porn comment at the top of the episode makes this very clear that Sam can and will and HAS talked sex with Jody before, but Dean thinks of her very differently) and while Dean’s neediness for a mom is an enormous aspect of the show and WHY Amara brought Mary back in the first place, he hasn’t reached out to Jody this way or started treating her as Mom (as I said, been keeping track if you’ve been reading all of these and yes 11x12 really was only their second interpersonal conversation and the only one so far Jody cracked him, while she and Sam are miles ahead). So there’s not too much actual overt rivalry between Mary and Jody

-

Oh no…….. Jody’s darkest secret….. she really liked Asa and wouldn’t have minded settling down with him if he’d had a mind to stay……

D:

What I love about Jody is that she still is at core a mom and someone who misses her husband and was happy being his wife - I mean they stayed together through the death of their son the first time, which is probably where a lot of her emotional awesomeness comes from or was put to its best use - and wouldn’t mind settling down again. She IS settled in her home and job and the little family she’s made anyway, but these things which are supposedly unfeminist for the Strong Female Character™ are actually embraced for Jody, that of course she may still have maternal instincts or want a husband and settle down, because she’s not hardened or a stone cold bitch in order to be able to shoot a gun or behead a vampire. I mean, *DONNA* exists and apparently cuts heads off tons of vampires (I really can’t tell if Jody is exaggerating or not in that clip from 13x10 but given Donna’s hardware in the back of her car (D-TRAIN….. I am in love….) I’d guess not???) so yeah there’s a whole range of female characters who all cut heads off vampires, from Mary to Jody to Donna, and none of them are ice cold and none of them are unfeeling, and all of them have weird, tragic, sad past marriage stories but they aren’t defined by them (Donna, slightly moreso, but it was one of like 2 character traits she carried out of 9x13 so hard to work around especially when they doubled down on it in every one of her episodes…. please don’t mention Doug(s) in 13x10 or 11…)

Anyway. Blah :P It’s 4am and I’m ranting about this.

-

Sam goes rushing to Jody when she’s exorcised :’)

It’s this attention to detail about who interacts with who that just… it makes me happy because obviously it bounces back to Destiel stuff, but also Sam very rarely has nice things and Jody is a Nice Thing for Sam

-

They should settle down and get married and add a dog to the Wayward Sisters family.

-

“That. SUCKED.”

-

Hey but you get a Sam hug out of it!

-

Bucky gets excommunicated and we burn a bunch of bodies and I don’t think about 13x01 and how we have a line up watching the burning here. It’s different, though, as the shot we get is Jody (lover) Mary (accidentally inspired him to hunt) and mom, and then the twins in the background, all of Asa’s most closely connected people together while Sam n Dean are off respectfully. But even to compare to the Cas and Kelly pyre with this line up doesn’t quite work to make any immediate parallels to me, except that obviously there’s overlap in imagery

-

“Sorry,” Mary says for stabbing Jody a bit  
“I’ve had worse,” she says, reflecting on the fact this is her first big hunt with the Winchesters since season 9 where she didn’t end up with a hospital trip :P

I love seeing them together - because yes, there is no open animosity, and anyway they’re thinking about Asa main text in this scene as it’s his funeral. Jody glances over at Sam and Dean and then addresses the present day issues in the family, being compassionate to Mary too because she is the Mom Friend and she will adopt all of you even if you’re Mary Winchester :P

And Mary uses this emotional resource to say that Sam and Dean aren’t the problem, to confess that it’s her own issues which are upsetting things, and Jody nods and leaves her to having a personal moment with her boys and maybe try and make SOME sort of connection with them.

-

Can I just say I love that Billie appearing in broad daylight is like “how can I step ominously from the shadows - ooh, convenient pyre, I will appear from behind the smoke instead!” and her commitment to her spooky aesthetic just can’t be beaten and that is why she is my favourite character and deserved everything :)

-

I think we maaay have seen the last of Jody for this episode?

… Gonna watch to the end anyway because aaaargh what a good episode. If Yockey hadn’t written 12x10 I would think this is my favourite :P

Also how great is it that there’s so MUCH in this episode between female characters in general? The last conversation with the 3 women at the pyre, and then the last real tension the stand off between Mary and Billie…

-

Yeah that was the last of Jody this episode.

-

Since I’m like 1 day out from Wayward Sisters now, I’m gonna have to skip through for Claire and Jody’s parts in their remaining season 12 episodes and maybe not write commentary for the WS stuff in season 13, which is okay as I already watched it this year knowing full well they were making Wayward Sisters so I don’t think there’s anything substantial to add, but we’ll see :D


	17. 12x16 TRANSFORMATION

Oh gosh season 12 drama in the background.

This episode is the blaaaatant set up for Claire having her own show and setting up her conflict and basically putting her where we see her next before 13x10

She passes through a transitional state in this episode, becoming not-human and back again, and like Dean in 6x05 struggling with being on the verge of being a vampire, she manages the master the monstrous side of her, not give into the hunger and eat the heart, and she’s rewarded by a death and life again transformation - Jody and Alex have already been through this, Alex with being turned into a vampire, Jody with being brought to the brink of death in 8x23 to the point of being a huge change in her life and outlook when we next see her. In 9x19 I talked a bit about how there’s a lot of metaphors for adulthood and Alex being kept “prepubescent” by Momma. Even though she obviously was older than that, vampire and werewolf imagery for teenagers is very much about puberty and transformation.

Our cold open girl, Hayden (? it’s been a while and I didn’t catch her name for like half the episode on my first watch and now I’m stuck on not knowing it :P) is desperate to seem older, to get out of town, to go to bars, to grow up and get a car and survive the 2 more years before she can move away from the town and make her own life.

Claire is older and nearly 21 (if her birthday is assumed to be roughly around the 20th episode in a season assuming they keep loosely to the “shit goes down around air date of the finale” thing they like doing, e.g. literally in season 12. Idk about season 10 where we might get the date from.) But yeah, she’s making a decision for life, supposedly shopping around colleges while actually following the case.

Hayden and Claire both get bitten while trying to assert themselves as older and more competent - I can’t remember Claire’s exact argument with Sam but I think it was about the fact he lied to Jody on her behalf but then obviously they got into that… Anyways, Hayden would have had a life to live if not for Mick, and Claire is saved by him in the end - but there’s a lot about her strength to survive it - Mick has no confidence in the cure and calls her a miracle for surviving it. It is put down to her strength of will in the end, and she overcomes it and comes back to life with a much clearer purpose and no more keeping one foot in pretending to look for colleges for Jody.

-

I like Dean’s approach to Mick, especially since he’s nurtured Claire and had her tag along on a hunt - this “foreign exchange student” thing contrasts to “bring your daughter to work day” when it comes to labelling their dynamics. Because it shows how kind Dean was to Claire about her tagging along in 10x20, even when he was grumpy about it, compared to the drama of thinking Mick is useless and will get himself killed. Both Mick and Claire get into a lot of scrapes and complicate everything in this episode, which Dean describes as a milk run in the opening and hearing the details and I imagine actually would have been if Claire and Mick both hadn’t been here. Which is not a judgement on Claire being useless - she does help a lot with the bits she does do, though I wish she’d got a chance to talk to Hayden. She did solid work to get onto the case, find it, and start following leads. And she wasn’t messing up something specifically on the hunt, just letting her guard down when walking for unrelated storming off in a huff reasons, when she got attacked. Which is a lesson brand new baby hunters need to learn. Keep your head in the game. And that’s something that fucks over the Winchesters a LOT in the early seasons, making assumptions they won or letting the monsters get the drop on them.

-

I REALLY love how Dean realises it’s Claire from the description, immediately, and Sam doesn’t realise immediately. Dean generally has a better memory for the people who have passed in and out of their lives. Maybe Sam just isn’t prepared for the idea that someone they know might show up, while Dean low-key wonders what Claire is up to and is pretty prepared for the idea she might be there, just as he might expect anyone else they know well to be around hunting if he knows that they’re around and active? Or just that the description of Claire just immediately hit him because she’s small and blonde and he just *knows*. That sort of parental dread :P

-

YEEEAH Here’s our girl, 13 minutes in

She’s visibly got a messy car in just one shot, her hair is back to being vaguely dishevelled, and her phone case case design is messy triangles

I think I see roses and flowers in them - it’s a fractured image because she has a fractured self. Her phone is black and white with pink/light red triangles, and that’s the black and white and greys of hunting and monsters, with the red of blood mixed in… Her nails are painted with a single coat of shiny clear polish that’s growing out, different lengths, cracked, and dirty. Remember how perfect her nails were in 10x20? When she hugs Cas and they’re the same colour as his coat and an even, glossy colour and length… Yeah, they’re going to character depth now for Claire :P

And then she hears one of her dozens of work phones go off, and she dives into her messy car, moves a comic aside (oh, she’s the new generation of Dean, no doubt :3) and gets to work. Like a professional.

“Hello!!!?”

-

Shame there’s a total troll on the other end of the line.

-

I love how she sits so confidently with them, and looks judgmentally at Mick, shares a laugh with them that he’s conceptually ridiculous but this is the nonsense they’ve got themselves into this time.

She’s wearing Krissy’s plaid and has a car a lot like Krissy’s this episode, which is a nice callback to the Wayward Sister Who Wasn’t - aka she has a job on a different CW show and tbh it’s much nicer we got a variety because Krissy and Claire are a similar personality and trope, while Alex, Patience and Kaia all have substantial differences. I see this as Claire absorbing Krissy’s legacy, like, move it, I have the bigger more embedded backstory :P

(I mean she shoves her aside back in season 10 so this is just a nice homage to the character)

-

Mick brings her a beer because drinking laws… She’s like 4 episodes off her 21st birthday but Dean stops her because he’s dedicated to this “don’t get as fucked up as us” thing, and I think this is an important detail in this episode with the grabby bartenders because again Claire and Hayden are paralleled that Hayden was going to bars and drinking waaaay too young (I think she’s 16 if I remember blah about this episode??) and obviously Dean defends Claire against the grabby bartender, but also he’s protecting her from the whole concept of drinking too young - which Hayden and Claire have been paralleled, going into bars and “bartenders love me” etc, just that there’s a great deal of laxness in the hunter community about little rules like drinking, driving, hunting vampires legal ages, and Dean does not want Claire to be raised remotely like that - he will NOT be the older hunter who lets her have one beer because whatever, it won’t kill her. If he can even impart a SENSE that the older hunters are caring for her and protective of her then he can foster a better, more responsible environment, within the bounds of what they do. Which is, of course, totally fucked up, but Claire is now on the cusp of adulthood anyway and by Wayward Sisters will have reached basically full legal maturirty and I hope the no beers thing stops - whether she likes drinking or not once she can do it - and the story for her becomes just her adulthood and her career, and rising out of her messed up childhood, the better for it than Sam and Dean were anyway.

-

“I’m a big girl. I handled it.” Just doing this speed run, it’s clear she has grown up - she’s less shrill, her face is a little less round, and her voice is more confident, too.

Again, not dissing her acting - she was SUPPOSED to be shrill and scared and uncertain because she was a KID and they cast Kathryn as someone the actual age of the character they were portraying, which, yeah, teenagers are unsettling and we don’t like seeing them on screen apparently :P

In any case, this also goes back to my fears about her fears about being assaulted back in 10x09 and 10x10, where she didn’t have much caution and was very exploitable by weirdoes around a pool table, or by that guy who took her in as a “father” so she’d steal for him, and as I said when Cas comes to bust her out, she’s alone in a dark room in a place that is potentially full of strangers or authority figures who could abuse that power, and as soon as she hears something outside she’s in flight or fight mode.

Glynn has written a few lines about assault around her episodes - I liked the one in Regarding Dean where the bartender recoiled in horror at the thought she’d been taking advantage of Dean being roofied. In this episode we get Dean’s protectiveness over Claire and all… I’m not an expert in this or tuned into the discourse about how to write this sort of thing, but obviously the message is clear that being grabby and exploiting underage drinkers to come to the bar is bad, but using Dean to defend Claire and getting SO possessive over her - and the way he attacks the guy when going for the wrong lead on the case later having another metaphorical implication of him roughing up the guy behind the bar for his treatment of Claire later anyway, does send mixed messages about dealing with it, that it’s all down to whoever seems to be the tough man in charge of her life who will defend her. So idk, the intent is definitely there, and this is all in character for Dean anyway, since his feminism when it emerges is still very rough and defensive and I guess I’d say… not finely tuned :P

I mean, makes me wonder what would happen in this exact episode but with Jake Peralta randomly in Dean’s spot and how he’d handle the Message Of The Day being grabby bartenders

But the hunter community polices itself or acts as a unit unto itself (which 12x22 with show in a huge way and we saw in 12x06 with exiling … uuh, the guy who killed Asa. Wow, this medication has messed my head up, I watched it last night >.>) so basically Claire needs to be self-sufficient enough to ward off this mundane bullshit and keep herself safe (which she fails at with the werewolf attack heavily coded, as Dean’s vampire attack in 6x05, as a metaphorical assault, showing that her bluster here doesn’t work when it comes down to it), or she needs to be protected and defended by the men.

I don’t really have any suggestions because a lot of what happens here happens for the plot, and it’s clear the intent is good but there’s some nuance if you squint too long at it… I wonder just how deep it was thought through to combine all these elements. However the “it’s my life, I get all the votes” utterly wins back intent to portray these things in a feminist light… I’m definitely not saying I’m more feminist in a competitive way because when writing I have hecked the HECK up trying to portray situations well before realising the light in which they’re read…

-

> SAM  
> Anyway, why are you alone?
> 
> CLAIRE  
> Jody’s busy with sheriff stuff. And she said to call if I found anything.
> 
> SAM  
> So you called her?
> 
> CLAIRE  
> You called first. And she’s great, by the way. And so is Alex. So, should we go to the morgue?
> 
> DEAN  
> Take it easy, Clarice. Morgue’s closed.
> 
> SAM  
> By the way, when’s the last time you had a hot meal that didn’t come from a-a Gas-n-Sip microwave?
> 
> DEAN  
> Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> It’s been a while.

Claire lies blatantly, gets into a panic to distract them and ask to go to the morgue and continue working to hide from her own issues - which are of course Jody - and ends up getting into a state where Sam n Dean are concerned about her not having enough hot meals. This gets into conflict again as Dean is somewhat more defensive of this lifestyle (I wouldn’t say IN FAVOUR of it because he complains about having to eat road food multiple times, but in one case I can think of off the top of my head, under magical duress >.>)

In any case, remember how Jody described Alex as feral on first seeing her? Werewolf is a good match for Claire because she’s slipping in a way - these are comments on her losing track of her family (her heart - an important theme to werewolves and it’s not a coincidence Claire is forced to bite another heart to lure her to being a werewolf and leave behind her real heart) and becoming feral in the sense of just not eating, sleeping, washing in the same way “normal” people do. Sam and Dean meanwhile are being pampered by the BMoL and have their cushy Bunker home base…

-

And we cut to the next scene where Hayden transforms, and in self-defence becomes completely feral and attacks Mick, who kills her and restores her to being a normal dead 16 year old girl.

-

I LOVE Claire there with them in a suit helping investigate, and she’s just accepted and it’s clear there was no plot-worthy debate about if she was working with them or not. Which as I said up the top, contrasts to the massive drama about if Mick could come or not, compared in this episode as well as to other times she’s worked with them while obviously junior and inexperienced. I mean Dean giving her a gun in 10x20 alone…

-

Claire’s face when looking at Hayden :( She reaches out and touches the bed sadly. I think she feels a lot of empathy to Hayden.

-

Heh, and Claire gets to just chip in with the lore all confident and it’s not like a lesson or test.

-

Meanwhile Mick has to blow off this as a “Mistake” being the horrible rookie in the room. Claire gets to help lead the conversation - steering them to the monster still being out there and asking critical questions to steer the thought process in the room.

-

I LOVE Claire and Dean flouncing off together. He’s just assigned them different sides of the job but they have a synchronised leaving, and it’s because Sam is currently aligned with Mick aka amateur hour, while Claire is being shown to have grown in competence and skill and is a future hunter leader with her confidence and “Let’s do this!” about the case.

(She also makes a good call to look more hip and young and go talk to Hayden’s friend alone without Sam, as a peer rather than an investigator)

-

Sam grills her about her messy car (oh gosh I remember him complaining about demon!Dean messing up Baby in 10x02 >.>) and asks if she really is fine, just like basing Dean’s emotional state on his car.

-

> DEAN  
> See, here’s the thing about 16-year-old girls, especially 16-year-old freshly minted werewolf girls – they don’t just die.

heeeee - in episode foreshadowing to Claire surviving… Which should be obvious but is a nice commentary. Obviously she’s not sixteen, and we met her at the end of being 17, and as time does, she’s now, like, 20, but again Hayden seems to be representing Claire’s youth, inexperience, and general wildness that needs to be somewhat left behind, like her desire to get a car and leave home - which Claire, a few years older, has already done and will decide to stick to at the end of this episode. Which is why 13x10 will start with Jody calling her home.

-

> CLAIRE (smiling)  
> I was kidding before, but you really do look like a creeper.
> 
> SAM  
> Funny. How’d it go?
> 
> CLAIRE  
> BFF found. Beans spilled. Hayden was hooking up with this older guy on the DL, and she was really into him, but he was a total stalker. Texting constantly, ultra possessive. Skeeved her friend out so much she narc’d to Hayden’s brother.
> 
> SAM  
> Guess that explains why he was there.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> I did good, right?

well, I’m proud of her :P

Again, the stuff about stalking, the message that if werewolves weren’t involved narcing in this case is acceptable in order to protect a friend… But the werewolf thing of that getting them all killed blurs the lines a bit - you have to keep the human level and the monster level in mind at the same time of how people are working. Dean does in the previous conversation - telling Mick how it looks from Hayden’s mom’s POV of having to bury both her children now instead of having a chance with Hayden if they’d been sensitive about her case. I guess likewise we have the human perspective on it, and what happens next because monsters… Not totally sure this episode is in balance, but the message is good on one side anyway. :P

-

But then Sam reveals that he called Jody to check up on what she thought Claire was doing (eeee Sam and Jody having a talk off-screen)

And Claire explains how stifled she was as a hunter with training wheels, since Jody wouldn’t let her come in for the big fights… And how Jody has those expectations for Claire to be normal that I talking about in the previous episode. That Jody sees hunting as a balance, that you can live a normal life and hold down a job while doing it because she is a stellar example of a character who has managed this balance and can be a part of both communities with ease. Claire and Alex represent a split in 2 directions from Jody’s equal balance, and she favours normality, meaning the balance is unfairly tipped in an Alex direction. Obviously out of best interest for Claire, but it becomes humouring her to be a hunter, and hoping that Claire will take to it in the same way Jody has, with at least some interest in cultivating a normal life. Claire meanwhile would rather sleep in her messy car and eat Gas n Sip food for weeks on end rather than be stifled and treated like she is a child and not ready to get into the mix… Because like Dean she was denied a huge chunk of her childhood and innocence.

-

“I’m better off on my own… this way everyone’s happy” Also seeing herself as a burden, as something that will poison Alex and Jody’s happy normal life - a non-normative feeling of not belonging, a sense of that this is who she is and they’re denying her… Yep, there’s the queer metaphor for the week :P

Anyway then she says everyone treats her like a stupid kid, Sam and Dean included while trying to protect her - and she doesn’t even know that Dean threatened to break the bartender’s face over her, but she’d probably hate it as she said she handled it… Sam tells her to stop acting like one and immediately realises his mistake - that he doesn’t see Claire as old enough but there’s a blurry line in her age and experience where she’s so close to being an adult that she basically just needs this final metaphorical transformation and she’s THERE, that she’s not the 12 year old Sam first met… He knows he needs to have been more sensitive and used his words properly to lure her back, instead of snapping at her for having a diminished perspective on this (because she IS young and still sees adults in a certain way - that they don’t respect or understand her independence which she has because she was forced by all their bad decisions and choices to be too old too soon in her life… Blah blah trauma I’ve been over a lot lately. And so she storms off.

It kinda sucks that this “I AM TOO OLD ENOUGH TO LOOK AFTER MYSELF” strop is what leads to her getting bitten, and I’ve seen people critical of the message of this episode - that she magically suddenly is better after it but I think that’s missing that there is this metaphor of transformation and rebirth in the episode, and though it might not have some magic immediate effect, the experience definitely should affect Claire as a powerful learning experience, the near-death experience honing in how she feels about her family and how she wants to live her life, and in a way for Claire, being torn between two worlds, and one she hated and didn’t want, was unbalancing her and if she commits fully to being a hunter, she will be stronger for the choice and better understanding of herself, which is a more grown up way of seeing herself in the world…

-

SAM HUGS

not a good situation but still…

-

Oh poor Claire :(

-

Dean tries to reassure her that she can live with being a vampire but Claire reveals just how messed up and angry she is - “I can barely keep it together on a good day”. I mean, fair enough, Kate was pretty chill with no pre-existing trauma and then a strong drive not to become what the boys did, and Garth is the most zen character ever, and 8x06 where he picks up that rage penny and the spectre does nothing to him is a good sign that if anyone would become a werewolf but be utterly calm about it, it’s him.

But Claire… We’ve seen her so angry with the world, and driven to hunting by trauma and constant anger at her situation and at how hard it is to get the independence and strength she craves. Her struggles aren’t new because we’ve been seeing them all along, and our Carver era introduction to Claire shows her in a seething rage as they said her name for the first time…

-

Anyway she’s determined to try the cure, because she’s rather die than be a werewolf, and the men all try to decide for her, so she drops that great line, and he gives in and doesn’t argue. Because she’s right, and they will do anything to help her.

-

Lol shaking down Tribal Tatt.

-

I mean it is kinda fair after he was a douche to Claire… :P

-

She stares fearfully at the moon - even more than vampires, there’s feminine imagery involved in this, with the moon cycles affecting werewolves.

> CLAIRE  
> Aah! It burns!
> 
> (Claire grabs at her shoulder. She goes to the mirror and pulls off her bandage. As she turns to see the wound, it starts to disappear. She turns around and moves toward a gun on the table. Mick sees her and grabs it before she can)
> 
> CLAIRE  
> You don’t understand. It’s happening! Give it to me!
> 
> MICK  
> No.
> 
> CLAIRE  
> Then you do it, please! It’s happening! And you don’t understand how this feels!

Absolutely not a metaphor at all, huh? :P

(I mean the “it burns!” bit is a bit melodramatic, but she has now changed, and her first instinct is to want to kill herself because she’s so scared of it, so not in control of the feelings that come with being a werewolf)

-

I love how charged this scene is. Kathryn did such a good job :D

She goes from panicked to crying and curled on the sofa looking so tiny, and shaking feverishly.

And finally it sinks in that she has to tell Jody before this is over, and has the moment of realisation about how much she means to her. Same kinda near-death feeling as 11x12 but this time it’s not about finding she has a chance for family at all, but crystallising maybe that Claire doesn’t regret becoming a hunter and shirking doing what Jody wanted, but lying to her about it.

-

Blah blah douchey werewolf… Who still protests he has a good guy excuse and with the BMoL as the adversaries it makes sense to be somewhat worried about what chaos they’re causing, though still not sympathetic to him, even if tribal tatt was being the douchiest, he still was a dick himself about Hayden and letting her into the bar etc. Never mind conspiring to turn her into a werewolf.

-

Anyway he needs a pack, a family - again, something Claire is dealing with needing her “pack” and he uses a heart to seal it and the metaphor of changing where Claire’s heart is, that he wants her to share a heart with him and become part of his pack. She rejects it because she has a family and they love her and it gives her the strength to spit out the heart.

-

I love Dean having to fight Claire just because he’s not afraid to throw her into the fridge to knock her out if he needs to.

-

Scary werewolf!Claire… Fun :P Sam uses a backpack as a shield.

And even in the heat of the moment, Dean checks against his own reservations that Claire wanted to go through with this and he should do it.

-

This is considerably more growly than Alex’s transformation issues, which involved a lot more moaning >.>

-

I hate the Claire’s dead moment because it hurt sooooo much the first time. But yay she wakes up, looking like a flawless but blood-covered disney princess :P

“You guys look like crap” yeah you’re somehow immaculate aside from the blood :P

Anyways she’s all better now and came through it :D

-

And Claire’s still snarking and laughing about the experience. She also recognises that Sam and Dean are there for her when she needs them, and takes back complaining about them showing up treating her like a child - balance and equilibrium! Maturity in understanding they’re not trying to control her life, they just want her safe and hunters work together better anyways

It’s the same perspective about them that she goes and applies to what Jody means to her:

> CLAIRE  
> Hey. It’s me, Claire.
> 
> Okay, um, here it goes.
> 
> I’ve been hunting. Alone. And I know it’s not what you want to hear. And I know it sounds scary. It scares me, too, sometimes, but… this is something I have to do on my own. Just for a little while. But I’m ready, and I never would’ve been if it wasn’t for you being my mother.
> 
> Well, I better go. Um… Tell Alex she better not touch my stuff. 
> 
> I love you guys.

(The fact she clarifies who it is … aaaaah…)

I like that she learns from failure but as Dean once said, you aren’t a real hunter until you’ve died and come back from the dead… :P

Claire’s voice wobbles on “mother” and then immediately deflects into a more blustery tone of voice… She really is a mini Dean :D

I also love the detail she tells Alex not to touch her stuff, and 13x10 seems to open with her finding out Patience has been touching her stuff instead :P

Aaaah end of episode… AAAAAAH.

And as like basically everyone said when this ended, there goes Claire driving off into her spin off, hopefully a more sensible hunter who doesn’t “Hunt like a dumbass” and has her head on her shoulders and her motivation, drive and HEART all sorted out, at least towards the job.

But at some point… she has to come home :)


	18. 12x22 KICK IT IN THE ASS

Once again, an episode starts with a threat to kill Jody, but this time we aren’t left hanging seeing her last on a floor choking in her own blood before the title card… Mary is killing a guy in a scrapyard much like Bobby’s - the next location in 8x23 after Jody’s scene - and as we’re going backwards all the time, we get the notification that Jody is next.

And how protective are we meant to be of Jody now? ALL THE WAY. That name appearing on Mary’s kill list is to strike fear into our hearts.

But the savvy viewer has a pretty good idea Jody can’t be killed because they have been doing so much work towards a spin off…

-

Once more to Jody’s house! This episode largely features her fighting alongside Sam just as a total competence thing that she’s one of their trusted confidants, that her house will double as their base of operations when theirs is compromised, and a general sense that Jody can go off-duty and help them, no questions asked at this point. It’s all great stuff establishing her as completely embedded in their lives - as the frequent references to using her as a resource to get APBs out on people etc over this season and season 13 has shown. But there’s some good stuff in the first half, of course.

-

Mary pulls up outside, her blue car now a sleek modern make, rather than the car that pulled up outside Asa’s house. And she’s introduced by her feet again, and like in 12x06 she shows up at the door covered in blood and expecting to be let in - of course 12x06 in a way lets Jody’s guard down because showing it’s normal for Sam and Dean to do this to her, means that Jody’s less critical of Mary showing up covered in blood, because this is what Winchesters do, right?

-

The shot of the carpet with blood on it is totally unfair, and also in my Christmas fic I completely forgot to account for the fact Mary had already spent time in Jody’s living room while brainwashed :P

-

Again this room comes across as massive - there’s so much space in here, that is this house is going to become a permanent set, it’s ready for the masses of drama that might take place within it.

-

Jody sitting on the sofa with an ice pack and pointing wordlessly at Mary is one of the cooler little details she does :’)

-

I’m kinda sad we missed the fight where Alex came home, but Alex and Jody talk each other up for their part in the fight, which clearly has some dramatic staging :P

-

Mary saying “awwww you want to play mother to my son? He’s all yours” is just cruel because Jody just held Dean’s hand a mo and yeah they have a slightly different relationship than Sam and Jody, because Dean has pinged the mom friend thing rather harder than Sam has, he’s NEVER used or expressed Jody as a mom figure, and not even in ways in which it was never really directly said, but implied with Ellen early on etc.

I mean he’s Claire’s pseudo dad in some ways, and Claire and Alex etc are the age range of kids for Jody, and he’s old enough to be their dad… They are blatantly of a different generation and he’s closer to Jody’s - it may be they’re actually almost the same age, or Jody is a little older than Dean, but not by a wild amount. In any case, she’s NEVER replaced the bond Mary had and still struggles to communicate with Dean, when Sam would have been more honest, but seen her less as a mom in the first place. Dean’s issues are squarely with Mary, and he likes Jody, is all. Mary sees it’s a strong, non-romantic bond, and assumes Jody’s filling a hole again, but she has enough girls for that now :P Dean is in no way her lost little boy, whatever parallels there were hinted at in 12x06

She just reassures Dean that it’s not his mom.

-

And yeah, we know how much Jody cares about Alex and Alex cares about Jody, but we get the lovely scene where Alex is packed up to go lay low with Donna (yay! Confirmation that they all are in contact and help each other out away from the main action!) and Jody thinks Alex is going to fuss and ask her to take care, but Alex tells her the iconic catchphrase, “Kick it in the ass”… In this context it’s very much an Ellen and Jo parallel and it makes sense as Jody’s house just got used as a hunter hub, but their relationship is very different for obvious reasons, and I like that they’re a totally different iteration of the characters - there’s no replacing them or imitations, they’re their own people but even WITHIN this show they’re a legacy to earlier characters, and they’ve grown into that closeness to each other that compares to Ellen and Jo. And then they can take that to another show if we’re lucky :’)

-

heh, and Dean sending Sam off with a similar sentiment, but Sam’s the one who goes to kick it in the ass, aka to side by side them, Dean letting Sam go puts him in the position of responsibility and moves Dean away from being the parental role :’) Oh Berens

-

This episode is so weird if you skip the Dean and Mary stuff. Don’t ever do it.

-

Just kinda enjoying Sam and Jody fighting side by side :’)

-

Ahahaha nope nope nope accidentally catching Dean crying

-

I love how Sam leads this whole thing, but Jody just takes the cue that it’s time to kill that BMoL Umbridge lady to defend Sam when she might have been about to shoot him, and no hesitation to see if Sam would get to her in time. Letting her get the kill on this side, Mary on the personal side between her and Dean and Ketch.

It’s another defining moment in a way that we’ve seen Jody kill a lot of monsters but this is a random hunter war on a high level and she kills another human out of judgement that this is all too dangerous and out of their hands to deal with any other way and it’s all loosely in the area of monsters and magic, if only because they’re a dangerous secret society that would use magical and technological means against them. In any case, in 12x06 they just send Bucky away with a blacklist on him that he can’t interact with the hunter community any more but now it’s way more serious and they’re not policing their own, they’re protecting their own turf, and it puts Jody in a war-like situation we’ve never had her in before. It’s a huge line to cross, way more than knowing other hunters and spending time with Asa. It’s something that would be next to impossible to explain to the (other) authorities, and a bonding experience with the hunter community. She’s definitely the most hunter-y of them, even more than Claire, because this season establishes her as having deep connections with a community that not even Sam and Dean had cracked in the same way before her. It’s really important for WS I think that Jody is an actual figure in the hunter community, whether they exploit this detail or not, the fact she is strong, established, trusted and competent at this level is of course why she makes such an amazing choice to be the Nick Fury of these girls and this last episode of the season sets it up so it’s extremely clear how she’s a good choice, with the range we see in her 2 episodes, and the power she has as a character… Aaah I love it. I can’t WAIT to see her in action again.

-

I think that’s the last time we see her this season… Onto the next :D

…

Waaait that means walking smack into grieving!Dean what are you DOING Lizzy


	19. 13x03: …. AND WITH SOME PATIENCE WE’RE BACK TO MISSOURI

fuck. fuck fuck fuck.

*grabs The Man Pain™ by the ears and drags it out of the room*

this one screencap set me back an hour because I had to go walk around the house and get tea to deal with it :P

-

Okay after the last thing I said about an hour ago in 12x22 about Jody being super competent now - Sam saw that and Sam sends Jody to help Missouri, but Dean did NOT see that and doesn’t have the same history with Jody, and also is not projecting his loss into wanting to make Jack good at his powers so he can bring everyone back so is outwardly more of a mess than Sam, AND associates Jody on a sliding scale, closer to Mary than Sam does, but not obviously all the way into the mom bracket. But close enough that this is dangerous, and she’s like their last living person it must feel like. And so he snaps and off he goes.

-

Skipping through so quickly, it really is awful to see the changes they go through - I only had happy positive Dean for a couple of episodes.

At least he wants to hug Jody and Missouri, even if some of it is putting on a bit of a face.

Jody probably know how they’re doing because of the losses as well without asking, since I guess Sam told her or Jody would be more surprised.

-

Jody gets to watch Missouri and Dean going back and forth on what they think happened - learning from some great hunters :D

(Again, to the stupid complaints all the new hunters are incompetent because they know nothing - I don’t think Sam and Dean have encountered anything other than a werewolf or a ghost that they haven’t needed an immediate lore lesson on and they’ve learned more about both since then anyway as the need arises for more complicated plots… If Jody’s never had to account for wraiths before then it’s not a pop quiz to get it right, Missouri knew whether Dean was there or not, and now Jody has learned some useful things >.>)

-

Mostly just watching very happily, but I do like that the first time Missouri tries to say Patience it gets cut off by James hanging up - it seems very symbolic that he’s cutting Patience off from Missouri, that this is symbolic of the rift in their family. He knows about Missouri’s visions but hangs up on her before she can mention Patience, like he’s keeping her away from his daughter.

-

Jody is doing a lot of quiet observing, also of Dean and Missouri’s relationship - seeing there’s something really deep here, probably wondering why Sam sent her without worrying but Dean came here… And Dean responding to Missouri ordering him to save her family… Yeah. She doesn’t know everything that’s going on or what’s up with Missouri and what she means to them so there’s a lot to ogle at here :P She’s curious about it and she’s going to keep on watching this family at work, along with Dean for the most part, and at the end the 2 of them give Patience their advice on what to do next… eventually she gets back into the game for them.

-

14 minutes in this time… PATIENCE!

She’s so tall

she’s Wonder Woman

-

I love the way Ronson immediately sells her as having a superhero alter ego, and the way Patience catches the ball she chucks at her, it really does come across that this random scene could introduce just about anything. Since Patience is tall and athletic and can do physical stunts with mild psychic effect like catch that ball, it probably wouldn’t be that hard to incorporate that into a fighting style and make her pretty deadly, you know? :P

Link the Robert Downey jr Sherlock Holmes films where he would analyse people mid-fight to work out where to punch them best and predict their moves, but she’s getting magic to do it for her

-

Wooo flickery lights. Another introduction in a institutional place - we’ve met none of the WS (in the modern era of the show) in places associated with comfort and/or home, or work. Claire in the “child prison”, Alex in the police station, Patience at school (when she was safe at home but this is where her vision is so it counts…) and of course Kaia in a rehab facility. Claire and Patience probably have the most overlap with original introductions as Claire we see in a domestic setting doing her homework (non monster version) as the first intro to her, but at 12 years old she loses everything that Patience still has up to this point, and Patience is still doing homework and trying to pass all her exams at roughly the age we re-met Claire, which I think will probably be another point of conflict between them, if their first intro isn’t bad enough :P

(Again, as with Donna, everyone suffers and has sad backstories - like how Patience’s mom died and she never saw her grandma again either to boot… She seems positive and reasonably well-adjusted but that doesn’t mean her early years didn’t have their share of grief or loneliness, and what she learns this episode about her family and her own powers that she’s been taught to dismiss for years, is shattering enough. It’s sooo not an oppression olympics, I’m just really curious about the dynamics and how stuff comes across between the characters, and what amount of backstory they would have to share for other characters to find them sympathetic rather than annoying, e.g. Claire and Alex needing what happened in 11x12 to bond)

-

Did I ever write anything about Missouri with the bloody tears? I meant to… I’m not sure what exactly but it feels like something I meant to make a note on and didn’t write anything about, and I know I didn’t see anyone else writing about it… We didn’t see how she died but I can’t remember the wraith causing that effect in 5x11 so it seemed really symbolic to me.

-

Anyway Patience wakes up with nearly perfect hair. I love her. I want to see how long the pastel aesthetic lasts and I would fucking love it if we had a full series and she never caved and got plaid and kept wearing fuckin pastels for everything even when they get blood splatters. Commit to the aesthetic! She even managed to find one of Claire’s sweaters that was pastel black (aka grey) to steal in 13x10 :P

-

She hovers in the door and tells James that “grandma” was in her dream and he waves her off. I wonder if she had a gut feeling there was something weird about it all that she ignored, not just that the dream bothered her enough to mention it but that she kinda knew he’d not take her seriously, and it was a test… I wonder how much it’s subconsciously affected her to vaguely know what people would say all the time…

-

Jody’s instinct on Dean telling her Missouri is dead is to ask him if he wants to head back - as much for Missouri as for seeing if the wraith is still there, I think.

Missouri’s vision included a glimpse of Dean here, making this decision I suppose, and he decides, no, he will carry on like she wanted.

I wonder if her other vision of dead James was what happened if he didn’t make this decision, or was because she had a vision of Patience’s vision and that is something she would never know but would certainly motivate her to seek her out :P Like, how much of this is her instinct to protect her family and how much is this the steps needed to awaken Patience properly if Missouri takes the path where she dies like this and buys them the time?

She seems to have a pretty good concept of the branches of time and choice so I hope Patience begins to learn the ways to tell what it is she’s seeing and what the chances are of it coming true…

-

At the door, Dean aggressively shoves the door open when James turns them away, Jody tries to be tactful but Dean butts in before she can find the words and says Missouri is dead. Jody looks kind of unimpressed :P

But then she’s the one who tells James the warning that they’re in trouble, with the practised cop delivering bad news on the doorstep voice. Pre-bad news.

-

Lol @ Patience’s high high standards in men… If she is interested at all. C'mon, make her gay, show :P

-

I like that her vision wasn’t exact, but she still ended up hearing the same phrase… It’s something time travel fiction does a lot - assuming people will have stock phrases and actions even if you offset it one way or another, you’ll still see some variation on the same. Maybe Patience subverted a bunch of her vision one way or another because she low-key resisted it but at this point the warning still came because that was the most important phrase anyway and what the day had been building up to anyway - a really weird “wow, I’m ripe!” instead of “whatever you do, we end up here” play on destiny. Not that the show believes in fixed destinies at ALL but most likely outcomes/set events that have to happen one way or another even if it’s in very unexpected ways, things that falling dominoes will always end up making the pattern of whichever way they fall etc…

I am probably getting too philosophical over this :P It’s late and I’ve been watching waaay too much.

-

Love that Patience fights off the wraith with some degree of instinctive reflex/natural talent at getting in a good hit. I mean seriously just a little bit of training and she’ll kick ass :D

-

I love the instinctive teamwork of Dean shoots the wraith, Jody checks on Patience. And just like that, they’re connected :’)

Jody is super impressed that Patience managed to fight the wraith on her own as long as she did - long enough to break off its creepy spike anyway.

-

Oh nooo and then they break the news to her that she’s psychic and they’re pretty much expecting her to know she is…

Again the queercoded sort of yeah everyone gets deja vu that’s normal because hahaha either dad told me or I checked on the internet myself that sometimes people just get deja vu but it doesn’t mean they’re DIFFERENT you’re totally normal it’s a thing everyone goes through - *panic increasing in volume every moment*

“I’m NORMAL” Patience insists. She also knows Missouri claimed to be psychic so she has her own worries which would justify that she’s worried about this before.

-

“Why do you keep saying ‘was’?” :(

She’s astute, anyway. idk if she can read people like Missouri can - at least not with intent - but she definitely catches on to this detail even in the middle of her own panic.

-

Jody and Dean watching James and Patience argue, literally fading into the background as her drama takes central stage. Love it.

-

James cut out Missouri for a false prophecy, which I feel like she may have said to reassure him while hoping it would come to pass - in 1x09 we see her lying to a client so it seems like it might be habit to shelter people from news they won’t like, or she was just trying to be reassuring beyond reason because she too liked James’s wife and didn’t want her to die… However it shook out, he passes on a lie and something to shelter Patience from a truth HE doesn’t like - he knows Missouri’s powers are real in all other cases but beyond reason he’s angry she was wrong about this one thing, and so… lie lie lie. Missouri to James to affecting Patience’s growth and acceptance of herself.

(Btw this whole arc is repression and lies, which is blatantly a queer narrative with psychic powers as a metaphor and not in the same folder as the womanhood and adulthood journeys Claire and Alex were on… it’s probably because Berens is crafting this whole thing. If I had to rank the WS by queer subtext it would be Patience because this arc is *all* we’ve seen of her, followed by Claire and her Dean-style subtext and approach to hunting as the queer subculture which is the basic metaphor for reading the entire show as a queer text as a totality but she’s tapped into that conflict as her character thing, followed by a brief lol about “salty and sweet” for Donna, and I’m not entirely sure about how Kaia’s powers and the Bad Place etc subtextually manifest if it were examined in a queer theory lens so I’d probably wait and see 13x10 because there’s potentially one hell of a story there as it’s all connected to her psyche, but so far it manifests as self-harm and drug abuse metaphors/literal fact of her life even though she has a ~justification~ for OD'ing that was the supernatural problem she couldn’t deal with by mundane means aka the actual problem is a metaphor even if the drugs were literal…)

Anyway Patience regrets not having a life with Missouri - James says he spent his youth worrying Missouri would die; it feels a bit like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t for Patience knowing Missouri, as if they’d all been hunters together Missouri could have died anyway - but he robbed her of her time with her grandma instead. I guess James is crippled by grief and the fear of it, and the actual impact of it. Which is a strong motivation for him not to want Patience going hunting either as everything about his core character they built is either the actual loss of his wife, the fear of the loss of Missouri and Patience, and now he has to fact the actual death of Missouri, which he eventually responds to by once again wanting to live as normal, while Patience, now aware of her powers and her legacy, feels torn with wanting to use her powers to help and to no longer repress who she is, though she will try.

-

Finally Jody steps in, once again the voice of common sense and finality in the argument and just like, listen to me, I know what’s up. :’) By this point she’s experienced enough with the supernatural to combine her sheriff personality and hunter personality to a fine-tuned degree.

(I assume she’s had to do this on a smaller scale with local hunts when she may even show up to save someone in uniform, as she once did for Alex… I wonder how many people in town are in quiet awe of their sheriff and if we get WS pls let that be a subplot joke when they’re around town :P)

-

Of course James’s response to the threat is to say to run. He sends Patience to get her stuff, presumably while the adults talk, but Patience is distracted by the memory of what she’s lost - her mom, and then Missouri’s brooch, which gives her the vision/suspiciously strong memory of James disowning Missouri.

-

That phrasing that she would poison Patience is especially sad. :< The banning of the relative with a certain… difference… from seeing the kid who already may have that difference, so that they don’t influence them any more and there’s a chance for the kid to stay ~normal~

-

That brooch is way more sparkly but it really does look like the same shape and style as the one Claire wore on and off in 11x12

-

WHOOPS wraith in the closet

-

I still like the message that James will get the divination stones out and use them to find Patience, because Dean calls out wow you’re using magic and he’s like yeah desperate times. Obviously the metaphor waters down a bit here but in character for what they’re dealing with i like that James isn’t going to let principle win when it comes to protecting Patience - it gives me hope he will accept her choice to be a hunter, especially if he gets a message of the lives she saves and understands that she can become a hero, as it will mean he can accept her for who she is one day.

-

The whole sequence where Patience saves them in the fight is amazing and I think we talked over it a lot but I don’t really have anything amazing to say about it except that she’s very useful in a fight even when she’s tied up :D

-

That “First: gross” line is amazing and I may have to steal it, although it’s already so much in my pattern of character voice I feel like Berens probably stole it from ME :P

-

stab stab stab everyone is dead

and Patience has time to help

-

I like what Missouri said about only seeing certain timelines - the way Patience may be seeing different realities but of the immediate cause and effect sort, the ones closest to the main timeline but just if something went one way and not the other. Her big vision is indistinguishable from the present until she “returns” from it to the present moment, almost like her consciousness has collected the information from the future, and stuns her just long enough to convey all the information in a vivid “memory” which feels like the real experience.

-

“Guess I’m psychic.”

“Huh,” Dean says, seeing her confronting with peace and amazement at coming to terms with her repressed self.

-

“You still got it!” Jody says.

“Huh,” says Dean. “Guess so.”

-

Jody laser-eyes him but Patience comes out before she can accost Dean and offer him the magic 3rd “I HAVE A SHOULDER FUCKIN USE IT MAN”

-

Patience comes to announce she’s repressing everything again and going back to normal because her dad thinks it’s for the best, like that didn’t just cause all their conflict in the first place.

-

Dean agrees because he’s messed up and in favour of repression. Jody is like fuck that, here’s my number, if you need a found family for accepting people who will let you be who you are.

-

Again, Dean equating hunting life in general to not being normal and tapping into that queer metaphor for himself, and though Jody goes to tell Patience “you don’t have to listen to him” we get a lingering reaction shot of his pain and sadness as he shuffles off to lean on the car and look miserable.

I don’t wanna get in deep on The Man Pain™ because I’ve been resisting so hard, but Patience’s entire metaphor hits him deep and reminds him of all the loss he’s suffered - and with the queer metaphor that only doubles down on the loss of Cas… Moments before we get back to the Bunker for his shouting match with Sam where their other losses are ticked off but Cas comes out as the one thing that Dean can’t bear to lose and is eating him away like nothing else.

-

In the mean time, Jody describes this as “Not what you really want” and identifies where she messed up with Claire and why she left - realising too late that Claire identified with hunting as a way of life and who she really was, and that Jody had done exactly what James was doing with Patience, which was to stifle Claire and stop her from being herself, and she knows the same struggle will come to Patience…

-

ALSO I CRY ABOUT JODY DESCRIBING CLAIRE AS A DAUGHTER.

-

“If you try to force it down to make someone else happy, it will make you miserable”

Ahahahahaha

-

I’m not watching this last scene if you paid me.


	20. 13x09: THIS IS THE GOOD PLACE

This recap is a masterpiece of storytelling and I wish I had the time to break down why, when it tells Jack & Patience side by side like in 13x03 but overt, and when Patience has an entirely separate story to everyone else. Followed by this hard reset where we’re done talking about Patience, the music kicks up and we go back to a gratuitous shot of Baby to bring us back to the boys, and then the re-telling of Dean’s grief focusing now on it being about Mary, and telling in dramatic irony what he doesn’t know about her being alive, seeing that while he talks about losing her… And then more about Jack which makes him look bad, and then evil, for the sake of the fake out opening…

-

God there are so many paintings of giants it would be weird not have one, or imply one because CGI budget, but I suppose Derek hasn’t definitely painted the Bad Place in all his paintings… And he saw the apocalypse world too.

-

Lol “speak of the devil” - same thing the recap does

-

It’s so weird looking at Jack again after heavily paying attention to the girls for so long and skipping all his parts in 13x03… He’s like a main thing of this season and he isn’t relevant except his emotional arc overlapping with Patience and Kaia and their powers in the same way Sam’s overlaps with his… Layers and layers :P

-

I love how every arc tied together here though, except for of course the Cas and Lucifer one, which has been annoyingly shelved. But making Jack the AU and Mary and all smash together with the Wayward Sisters… Yep, it works :D

-

Next time out: Jack saves Cas from the Buckleming AU

-

Dean calling Patience and getting no answer, but trying to pull her back, now he himself has been pulled back from the brink by Billie and Cas’s return…

Jody wandering her big empty house, giving them a lead she found and we see her on-screen doing the stuff that the show has now repeatedly mentioned like a dozen times since season 12 of her helping them out from her resources with the police.

(It’s very convenient that Jack is doing this locally :P)

-

Yah know, they should be more alert to the fact Cas is following a lead in some random place Not There because either they tell him they have bad intel or they realise he’s lying to them. Last thing on Dean’s mind after Jack shows him Mary in the AU… Maybe not calling Cas off the hunt for Jack is another sign he addled them… :P

-

Anyways Dean and Jody have the same instinct that it was angels who burned out Derek’s eyes and they’re going to turn out not to be wrong about that :

-

“I think it’s your boy” I wonder how much Jody actually knows about Jack and what he means to them.

-

Aaand there’s Patience’s phone case to contrast Claire’s from earlier - pearled and shiny and perfect.

-

James is calling her to come down and she denies him and says “Just a minute”, immediately showing the conflict that she’s doing her own thing and not going where he wants her to, on a very tiny scale, but it’s her introductory note.

-

She owns up to Dean calling, admitting her conflict after probably a lot of calls, but not so many they’ve disturbed her from her test she did bad on - that’s an ongoing thing of her indecision between worlds, harming her that she’s still getting the visions and can do nothing about them, while also struggling to complete the things that tie her to the normal would. She’s in a liminal space.

-

Dean is part of Patience’s indecision forcing her out the door, and also directly forces Kaia to come with them and use her powers…

-

Dean saying “freaky imagination” and the girlfriend says “he hated that word” and Sam, the one who all the lil characters with their powers running around mirror at the core of this show’s language, says “freaky?” but it’s “imagination” - because this is reality that Derek has been depicting… just maybe not OUR reality.

-

“Jack gave up on us and is looking for Daddy”

NO HE’S LOOKING FOR MOMMY

-

“we’re in worst case scenario land here” Oh hon, you have no clue. You’re gonna be running from dinosaurs in a few hours :P

-

KAIAAAA

She appears 11 minutes in, which is pretty good going considering I’ve been timing it on the episodes which have a build up to the reveal/arrival of the WS character in question… :P

-

I rambled so much about her intro in my watch notes but I LOVE her being introduced facelessly and destroying that cup, snarking and fiddling and betraying like a million interesting character traits :D

And the shitty group leader is levelling a bunch of accusations at her about why she is here, and she’s totally on the defensive, knowing her life is utterly unfathomable to him. He doesn’t understand her. She IS a faceless no one in a hoodie to him because her face is her story, her connection to the Bad Place and dreamwalking. The facade of keeping up this snarky angry facade.

Finally she pulls back her hood and confronts him face on: “You don’t know anything about me.” “I don’t belong here.” “I’m not an addict.” “I hate doing this to myself.” And finally she smashes the cup and says that it’s what keeps her awake and from the bad place, angry enough to blurt about it.

“We have to face it eventually.” I think this is going to be a part of her character arc as it’s the note they leave her on in that group, but obviously NOT in a shitty group liket his, but with friends and family who care about her.

-

I like how Jack’s clothing loosely mirrors her, at least that he’s wearing a dark blue colour and t-shirt and fits in with the aesthetic around here.

-

Hey sometimes you need a peppy nephilim to pop up and get you out of a bad situation XD

-

Sam and Dean reading off Kaia’s tragic past is a really bleak way to look at it - she’s just a person on the case to them, her criminal record/available info just another way she’s institutionalised. They sound sympathetic but they’ve found her whole sad history and to them that’s all she is right now.

-

Jack mirrors Cas breaking Claire out complete with “he’s just sleeping!”

“You’re not the only one with powers,” he says like it’s blatantly obvious. Kaia’s never seen anyone using powers IRL I’d guess.

“What are you?!”  
“That’s a long story.” It really is.

Jack oversteps some boundaries, yet again reducing her to her powers, and the toxic masculinity thing of seeing helping someone as an exchange where you are now entitled to them - her powers in this case metaphorical of her being used for her body, I’d guess if you had to get a theme, it’s just all these men deciding what they want her to do for them, and Jack using her. The idea of her “facing it eventually” is a theme of her coming to terms with everything for *herself* and on her own steam.

-

Like Patience, she fights off an attack, rather more successfully than Patience :P But yeah, Jack obviously more complicated than the wraith, and though we rightfully question his boundaries, we discover his heart has been in the right place after all and he didn’t kill Derek and he’s been searching for Mary.

-

Oh, I forgot Jack called it “Apocalypse world” - I assume that’s significant.

I flagged up “I could see what he saw” in my actual notes, I’m sure of it, but throwing in that it’s what Momma says about Alex as well - transformation and becoming. Demon!Dean and Alex to a vampire… The phrase is about control and taking over someone, changing their perspective and turning them into a different version of themselves.

In this episode, though, Jack shows Kaia what Derek saw - we don’t know if/how this affected her yet but it seemed like a positive development - the parallel was to Amara giving Sydney the bliss in 11x05. And I don’t think Jack’s powers are ALL bad, they’re neutral and I suppose doing something good for Kaia balances out what is sure to be a total disaster with Billie’s warning and the universe hopping he’s doing… This search for Mary unsettles me and this language doesn’t help

-

“It’s easier if I show you”   
IT’S REALLY NOT. USE YOUR WORDS.

but he’s still not adept at using language to persuade and convince, relying on his powers to do the talking for him…

-

His visions do not reveal themselves as Patience’s do, with white flashes and distortions. His view is much more the real thing, revealing through clouds and things coming into focus, zooming in and in like an eye searching them out…

-

KAIA NO DON’T HITCH HIKE. YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER THAN THIS

-

Welp

-

Patience sees Jody get stabbed so many times in her visions.

She has such a huge car that looks like a tank I have to wonder if they gave it to her as a resource for WS and okay her dad seems pretty rich but this is almost hilarious? Is this just an American thing? I know nothing about this make of car. If she takes it with her and it’s part of the show and she parks it next to Claire’s car…

-

Kaia wakes up and finds out she’s accidentally part of the mytharc just because Jack broke her out of rehab, and now she’s captured by angels who are ranting random nonsense exposition at her which is probably worse than the group chat :P

“What the fuck” she whispers to herself

-

And she has to find out Derek is dead, the one person who had ever helped and understood her :<

-

She has no clue what’s going on, just that it sucks :(

-

You know, considering there’ll be a hefty gap both of time and a very very Winchester light episode next, I think it’s especially good we got this Jack scene in the car spelling out everything they’re all feeling - it means when we get back to it there’s less ambiguity than normal about how they feel, and they can use some clips in the promo and… idk, it feels like good closure on the first part of the Jack arc, since it seems like he’s at a new turning point in his story.

-

Meanwhile: Patience packs up to leave, promising to only be gone for a few days.

Finally she admits all the truth, gives us a soundbite about her powers for recaps, and explains how she’s found who she is, needs to help people and that she can’t ignore it any more.

I love especially her throwing it back on him that he raised her to be so good that she can’t help but respond to this crisis :D

And then he gives her the ambiguous “you go now, you don’t come back” line which is either a banishment or a warning that she’s never going to be normal again. I like the latter, because she leaves despite the warning, and embraces that she’s not going to be normal, she’s going to be where she’s needed, saving people.

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Kaia’s amazing speech about not making a milk carton. As I said in the 10x09 comments, she lists 2/3 criteria that Claire, the one who parallels her the most, still fits - Claire and Patience have overlap in their backgrounds, Claire and Kaia in their lives, I guess. And Claire’s lived in an in between state for a long time, including also having the experience of being raised by Jody but not as long as Alex, and having left it too - she really is a bridge between all of them :P

(Sorry, I already gushed over Kaia’s speech here a few times so I’m just looking at WS dynamics I guess >.> Kaia’s political awareness is definitely the highest because she’s grown up in the most political situation, and I’m really glad they didn’t file off that from her character, that she would be critical of the system, of the government, of anyone giving a crap about her. I also love the idea that Jody and the other girls give a crap about her immediately for more than her powers, but because they genuinely like her and want her around and she has FRIENDS and a family… Gah, I’m already so protective of her :P)

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I like in the mean time the Winchesters come for her anyway.

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Kaia’s face is so great as Jack comes running over… “are you okay?” “NO!” it’s a reasonable response :P She gets the talk about hunters and what they do very quickly while they’re freeing her and despite the dreamwalking, she obviously wasn’t ready for all this - never mind Jack in particular.

Buuut then it turns around on her that they really want her for her powers. Jack watches curiously and sees that they’re all going ahead with this, and then in this conversation, Kaia becomes an object.

“They only wanted me because of you” Aka if you stop asking me to do this thing and let me go about my business, the angels leave me alone and I stop being in danger.

But the 3 men all decide they want her to do it, for all their own personal reasons but look at it from her eyes and yiiikes even before she’s abducted at gunpoint to do it.

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A lot of these episodes make the Winchesters look bad from the outside - 9x19 especially. This one makes them look just as bad as the people they just rescued Kaia from >.>

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She explains how her powers suck and she may be powerful but only to go to one place - the Bad Place. At which point if you saw the title of the episode beforehand it aaaall sinks in how this is going to end… NOT WELL.

But yeah, it’s horrible to learn how traumatic this all has been for her - as she explains how much she’s been hurt by the Bad Place, and it all makes sense why she would stay awake, not to to avoid seeing it but to avoid being killed by it.

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She looks so meh Dean when he shouts at her and puts the gun in her face. Just… Not scared or anything. Just, wow. What a surprise, now they’re telling me what to do. Resignation and defeat that of course they wouldn’t rescue her for anything more than using her powers, and see her as nothing more than them.

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Jack clearly overhears Sam and Dean whispering about what they can do, and starts trying to reassure Kaia that this is positive and he can help her as well. She sees him as just the reason Derek is dead, the reason all this bad stuff is happening to her, but he convinces her to let him show her what Derek saw, because, well, it’s a piece of Derek even if nothing else. And it’s what her powers could be if she learned to use them, maybe a key to not going to the Bad Place… there’s a lot of motive to let him give her this five second glimpse if he can really do it.

“Our powers can be good. We can do good in this world.” :)

She scrunches back up away from him to look out the window, but smiling to herself and changed by it… We don’t really get a chance to check in with her but obviously convincing her to help next episode is going to be important so knowing how she feels about her powers will be too…

But a good message to end any of the calmer discussion in the episode on, for Jack and Kaia to carry into their respective stories. Patience already knows she can use her power for good and the problem is she wasn’t allowed to use it/didn’t know she had it, while Kaia’s had hers tormenting her and wants to avoid using it… And definitely needs to learn control

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Dean trying to face off like 7 angels is pretty epic :D

… time to leg it :P

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Awww no Baby’s going to be abandoned outside this rusty old ship… Poor car :P I wonder if she’ll even be in the episode. Like they just go past her and Claire knocks on the hood. “Whoops, looks like you got left behind.”

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Jack saying it will be fine out of nothing but optimism because that’s his personality, Dean running past with more experience saying they’re screwed.

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I swear they somehow added the line in this version I’ve had downloaded the entire time, that Jack can’t do anything about the angels because they’ll hit him with angel radio.

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Kaia is a survivor :D I suppose the fact it’s her plan to do it means she’s not totally manipulated into it, although they all think it should be the Apocalypse world while they could have gone to the nice peaceful waterfall world to regroup and work out what to do next :P

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Love these scary angels.

I love how they make them super scary for the first time in ages, and then Kaia vaporises them all

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It’s pretty impressive that Kaia managed to let go of her fear of the Bad Place long enough for Jack to see his way into the apocalypse world :D proud of her

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Ew flickery bright flashy bit as Kaia loses it, and sees the hooded figure and completely falls to bits. I want to know their connection!!

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Anyway everyone’s gone and it’s all still and quiet, and peaceful at Jody’s place, but knock knock hi new mom everything’s going wroooong and you’re just watching netflix.

You did good Patience :’)

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I LOVE all these shots inside the boat, of the angel wings, the stillness, the sinister glowing light of the portal

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Kaia by the side of the road waiting to be rescued once more…

Guess that’s the end of the episode :P

Well okay there’s some stuff with grandma and a dinosaur and Sam snoring but yeah.

BRING IT ON!!!!!!!!!!


End file.
